Category: Dementia – Supporting Carers

Most persons with dementia (PWD) receive the majority of their care from primary care providers (PCPs). A number of challenges have been identified with providing quality dementia care in primary care from the perspective of PCP. However, less is known of the primary care health care experience (HCE) of PWD and their caregivers.
The HCE of PWD and their caregivers is complex and a number of factors which are potentially modifiable by PCP may improve the HCE for the growing number of PWD in primary care. Understanding these experiences may help to identify strategies to improve care and patient and provider experiences.

This article is not available from the Academy Library’s collection. If you would like us to request it from another library, please call 0161 291 5778 or email the UHSM Academy Library

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that patients with dementia are more likely to die if their caregivers have poor mental health.
The findings demonstrate that caregiver health, and mental health in particular, should be taken very seriously by doctors treating patients with dementia. Thankfully, medications are available for depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and other mental health disorders, and physicians should not hesitate to treat them.
The researchers aren’t exactly sure why caregiver mental health appears to have such a pronounced effect on patient mortality, but they suspect that poor mental health may damage social bonds between patients and caregivers, which are known to lead to worse health outcomes.

Access the paper by clicking here.

The MEETINGDEM study aims to implement and evaluate an innovative, inclusive, approach to supporting community dwelling people with mild to moderate dementia and their family carers, called the Meeting Centers Support Program (MCSP), in three countries in the European Union (EU): Italy, Poland and United Kingdom. Demonstrated benefits of this person-centered approach, developed in The Netherlands, include high user satisfaction, reduced behavioral and mood problems, delayed admission to residential care, lower levels of caregiving-related stress, higher carer competence, and improved collaboration between care and welfare organizations.

Click here to access the article. An OpenAthens login is required. Alternatively call 0161 291 5778 or email Academy Library for a copy of the article.

Inadequate education of carers of people with dementia (both family and professional) is seen as a key problem that needs addressing in addition to challenges of self-neglect, social isolation, medication nonadherence. Seven out of top 10 problems related to patients and/or carers signalling clearly where help and support are needed. The top ranked solutions focused on involvement and education of family carers, their supervision and continuing support. Several suggestions highlighted a need for improvement of recruitment, oversight and working conditions of professional carers and for different home safety-proofing strategies.

Click here to access the article. An OpenAthens login is required. Alternatively call 0161 291 5778 or email Academy Library for a copy of the article.

Caregivers experience a complex role, with added responsibilities, new tasks, and emotional and relational challenges that are expressed through distressing emotions and demands for interaction. Additionally, the caregiving role leads to positive experiences, such as acceptance and adaptation, support and help, and positive changes in the relationship. Day care relieves family caregivers by meeting the person with dementia’s needs for social community, nutrition, physical activity, and structure and variety in everyday life. Using a DCC led to a higher quality of time spent together and easier cooperation, but it also produced some hard feelings and challenging situations. DCCs gave the caregivers a feeling of freedom and increased the time available to be spent on their own needs, to be social and to work or do practical tasks undisturbed.

Click here to access the article. An OpenAthens login is required. Alternatively call 0161 291 5778 or email Academy Library for a copy of the article.

This study examines the specific needs in young onset dementia (YOD) to provide the basis for the development of an e-health intervention to assist caregivers in coping with YOD in several European countries.

Click here to access the article. An OpenAthens login is required. Alternatively call 0161 291 5778 or email Academy Library for a copy of the article.

The vast majority of people suffering from dementia are assisted by informal caregivers, who play a key role in fulfilling the patients needs, promoting the possibility for people with dementia to live in their home environment. The Internet as a support tool in psychoeducational programs can significantly improve accessibility of them, becoming a currently consolidated interactive resource for the training of patients with acute and chronic diseases, and their caregivers.
On balance, the studies show a significant improvement after the psychoeducational intervention. Specifically, the improvement in caregivers wellbeing can be observed in the measures for self-efficacy, anxiety and depression.

This article is not available from the Academy Library’s collection. If you would like us to request it from another library, please call 0161 291 5778 or email the UHSM Academy Library

Caring for people with dementia at home requires a significant amount of time, organization, and commitment. Therefore, informal caregivers, mainly relatives, of people with dementia often feel a high burden. Although on-site support groups are known to have positive effects on the subjective well-being (SWB) and perceived social support of informal caregivers, there are cases in which relatives have either no time or no opportunity to leave the person alone or in which there are no support groups nearby. The TALKING TIME project aims to close this supply gap by providing structured telephone-based support groups in Germany for the first time. International studies have shown benefits for informal caregivers.
The results of this study will provide further information on the effectiveness and optimization of telephone-based support groups for informal caregivers of people with dementia, which can help guide the further development of effective telephone-based social support group interventions.

Click here to access the article. An OpenAthens login is required. Alternatively call 0161 291 5778 or email Academy Library for a copy of the article.

This app is for carers of people with dementia. Developed by Health Education England’s Thames Valley team in partnership with the University of Reading and in collaboration with healthcare professionals and carers, it offers practical information to support users’ understanding of the progressive nature of dementia and the challenges of caring for someone with the condition.

This article is not available from the Academy Library’s collection. If you would like us to request it from another library, please call 0161 291 5778 or email the UHSM Academy Library

Women provide nearly two-thirds of all elder care, with wives more likely to care for husbands than vice versa and daughters 28% more likely to care for a parent than sons. Making up 47% of the workforce in 2015, burgeoning caregiving demands will disproportionately fall on working-age women, as will the associated decreases in self-esteem.
For women who remain in the workforce, dementia care responsibilities can increase costs to their employers from absenteeism, productivity loss, stress-related disability claims. It remains to be seen whether men can be persuaded to assume an equal share of the burden of caregiving. While gender parity in childcare is modestly growing, gender parity in dementia care is unlikely to occur anytime soon.5 Hard-fought gains toward equality in the workplace for women are at risk.

This article is not available from the Academy Library’s collection. If you would like us to request it from another library, please call 0161 291 5778 or email the UHSM Academy Library