Articles: caregivers.
-
Effective hospice care is dependent upon a caregiver who is able to with-stand the physical and emotional ardors of the experience. Direct support for the family caretaker is as needed and valuable as the direct care hospice agencies provide to patients. Massage was found to be successful in addressing many of the stress of primary caregivers. Nearly all of those who participated in an outreach project that used massage as a respite intervention reported reduced physical and emotional stress, physical pain, and fewer sleep difficulties.
-
The associations between measures assessing bereaved carers' health status and their perceptions of the quality of palliative care delivered by community nurses, general practitioners and hospital doctors to cancer patients in their last year of life are investigated in this paper. Analysis was conducted on a sub-sample from the Regional Study of Care for the Dying (RSCD), a survey in which relatives or friends of a random sample of deaths in 1990 in 20 health districts in England were interviewed some 10 months after the death. ⋯ The results showed statistically significant associations between bereaved carers' self-rating of health status, their psychological functioning, their experience of bereavement-related health problems, and their satisfaction with services delivered by the different providers. Further research is needed, however, to explore in-depth the nature of these associations.
-
Int J Geriatr Psychiatry · Oct 1997
The Caregiver Activity Survey (CAS): development and validation of a new measure for caregivers of persons with Alzheimer's disease.
Most instruments that measure the impairments associated with Alzheimer's disease assess symptom severity. Little attention has been paid to the illness's impact on the time formal and informal caregivers spend caring for Alzheimer's individuals. A tool that measures the time spent caregiving would help to determine the economic impact of the illness. The Caregiver Activity Survey (CAS) was developed to measure the time caregivers spend aiding Alzheimer's patients with their day-to-day activities. ⋯ The CAS provides a new tool that measures time spent caring for Alzheimer's individuals. The instrument may be used to augment existing clinical assessments that measure the efficacy of potentially therapeutic agents for persons with Alzheimer's disease.