Hospitalisation

The experience of having a child hospitalised is stressful and disrupts families in myriad ways; however, the experiences of parents/caregivers who encounter repeated admissions of a child with acute lower respiratory infections are under-researched. This project aims to explore these experiences, from a qualitative perspective, using the philosophical tenets of reflective lifeworld research.

Hospitalisation of a parent with acute mental health problems impacts the consumer, their extended family/carers and children. Mental health nurses are at the forefront of promoting recovery for consumers in an acute inpatient setting. Recovery-oriented care can include provision of family-focused care which supports recovery of the parent-consumer and their family members and contributes to prevention of intergenerational mental illness.

Background Informal caregiving offered by family members has been widely studied in the community setting, but little attention to date has been dedicated to that offered at the hospital level. Aims To describe the proportion of patients admitted to acute medical units receiving care from informal caregivers as decided by the family and to identify the factors affecting the numbers of care shifts performed by informal caregivers.

Little research has examined how, or if, involuntary commitment has impacted on the burden experienced by the family. This paper reports a qualitative study which explored how involuntary commitment under the Mental Health Act (MHA) 2000 in Queensland, Australia impacted on families of people with mental illness. Family members of a person with a mental illness, under involuntary commitment at the time or in the previous 12 months, participated in focus groups. Thematic analysis was used to determine the themes.

This study assesses the effect of having informal support available at home on inpatient care use in Switzerland. The main contributions are to consider the availability of care regardless of its source, measured by multiple-adult living arrangements, and to examine this effect by type of inpatient care and source of potential support. A two-part model with region and time fixed effects is estimated to determine the impact of informal care availability on the likelihood of hospitalisation and length of stay, conditional on hospitalisation.