Research update: Support for family caregivers
8th June 2016
Research published this month in the journal Psychooncology highlights the need for targeted early intervention and support for family caregivers. Family caregivers provide informal, unpaid care that goes beyond social support to their family members. They help with personal care and symptom management, and act as a proxy for patients. They may be spouses or partners of the patient, adult–children, other relatives, friends, and neighbours.
Caregiving may represent a rewarding experience, and families may experience increased cohesiveness and a sense of meaningfulness. However caregivers may also suffer from depression, anxiety, and higher grief intensity in bereavement. Complicated grief describes a pathological outcome involving psychological, social, or physical morbidity following a bereavement. Complicated grief worsens physical and mental health, and is associated with increased mortality. Bereaved caregivers are more likely to suffer from complicated grief than the general population.
Using data from the Qualycare study, funded by Cicely Saunders International, researchers evaluated the factors of care associated with adverse bereavement outcomes in family caregivers of patients who died of advanced cancer to determine whether the identified factors influenced the outcomes of caregivers differently.
Particular attention was paid to the identification of risk factors which may be modified following risk-assessment and intervention prior to bereavement, including the burden associated with caregiving and role strain which is experienced by adult–child caregivers in particular.
Researchers identified a ‘window of opportunity’ before bereavement when palliative care practitioners are ideally placed to identify those at risk of adverse bereavement outcomes, allowing services and effective interventions to be targeted appropriately. Support for family caregivers, particularly adult-child caregivers, is key.
McLean S, Gomes B, Higginson IJ. The intensity of caregiving is a more important predictor of adverse bereavement outcomes for adult-child than spousal caregivers of patients who die of cancer. Psychooncology. 2016. DOI: 10.1002/pon.4132