Costs and cost analysis

Background: Parents are confronted with a range of direct costs and intense caregiving demands following their child's cancer diagnosis, which may potentially threaten the financial stability of the family. Objective The aims of this study were to explore the financial impact of a new childhood cancer diagnosis on families and understand the strategies families use to manage these financial impacts.

Background: Over the past decades, informal care has increased in most OECD-countries. Informal care is costly to caregivers and to society in the form of lost income and direct costs of providing care. Existing evidence suggests that providing informal care affects caregivers’ overall health. However, estimates of the social costs of informal care based on national data on individuals are currently scarce.

BACKGROUND: Family caregivers play an important role in the care of patients receiving palliative care, yet little is known about the financial impact of family caregiving in this context. A lack of existing validated tools for collecting data on the costs of family caregiving in palliative care has resulted in a weak and limited evidence base. The aim of the study was to describe the development and initial piloting of a new survey tool which captures data on the costs of family caregiving in palliative care: the Costs of Family Caregiving (COFAC) questionnaire.

BACKGROUND: Psychotic illnesses have a substantial economic burden on patients, family members, friends, and society in general, still there have been limited attempts to estimate the costs associated with this condition. Moreover, nothing is known about the differences in costs between patients depending on disease severity, i.e. state of remission.

AIM: Estimate the direct and indirect costs for a defined patient population with psychotic illness in Sweden, and demonstrate differences in direct costs depending on disease severity (state of remission).