Articles: caregivers.
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Based on a community sample, to assess the reasons disabled elderly people need care, the type of formal services they receive, the characteristics of their carers and the degree of psychological morbidity in these carers. ⋯ Family carers play an important role in maintaining disabled elderly people in the community and this role is often stressful. Formal services have to be aimed as much at the needs of the carers as at the disabled people themselves.
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Curricula in pediatric resuscitation must be based on adult learning principles. The Pediatric Basic and Advanced Life Support Courses (PBLS, PALS) should use educational strategies fostering positive interactions between the instructor and learners and should take into consideration the learner's motivation for taking the course. Materials should be developed for a specific target audience; course design should be flexible to meet individual needs. ⋯ Discussion of the trauma patient is limited in the PALS course; additional trauma education could be facilitated by the addition of a trauma module or by other educational courses. All aspects of the PBLS and PALS educational programs must be evaluated continually to determine whether learning objectives have been met and whether the teaching format is appropriate. The answers to evaluation questions will help determine the degree to which the American Heart Association is meeting its educational objectives and how to allocate resources for development and training.
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The majority of seriously mentally ill people are unmarried and cannot obtain support from spouses or children. Help from parents is time limited. In the absence of spouses and parents, siblings are often the closest relations for many seriously mentally ill people, but their potentially supportive role has rarely been examined. ⋯ Furthermore, most were willing to increase their current amount of support. Sibling support was greater when both parents were not alive, resulting in the increased importance of siblings over the life course. Policy markers, mental health professionals, and researchers should pay more attention to the question of sibling support.
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J Psychosoc Nurs Men · Jan 1993
Case ReportsGrieving: facilitating the process for dementia caregivers.
1. Grief is a psychological and physiological process that occurs in response to a specific loss. Through the grieving process, those who have experienced a loss come to terms with the finality of the loss and the meaning of the loss in their life. 2. ⋯ Because such losses are often hard to recognize, nurses can plan interventions to facilitate predeath grief. 3. Even when dementia caregivers are able to work through their predeath grief, they cannot fully re-establish their lives until after their relative dies. Some caregivers may never completely resolve the predeath and postdeath losses that have resulted from caring for their relative.
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J Community Health Nurs · Jan 1993
Multiple sclerosis: stressors and coping strategies in spousal caregivers.
Community health nurses, who have frequent and prolonged contact with patients afflicted with chronic disease, play a central role in the assessment and care of patients and their families who must deal with the many ramifications of long-term disease. The importance of multiple sclerosis in health care is a result of its worldwide prevalence rate of 57.9 per 100,000 population, its tendency to occur in the young adult, and its chronicity. This exploratory study was designed to describe the stressors of caregivers of individuals with multiple sclerosis, to identify coping behaviors used by caregivers, and to explore the relation between caregiver stress and caregiver coping behavior. ⋯ Findings revealed significant correlations between caregiver stress and caregiver coping behavior. These findings indicate that as stress in the caregiving role increases, there is an increase in the use of various forms of coping behaviors, both problem focused and emotion focused. Types of stressors and coping strategies used by caregivers are described, and nursing implications are discussed.