Health care providers, policy makers, and investigators are dependent upon the quality and accuracy of published research findings to inform and guide future practice and research in their field. Systematic reviews, the synthesis of outcomes across studies are increasingly more common in the family literature; however, published review reports often lack information on strategies reviewers used to insure dependability of findings, and minimize methodological bias in the review. In this article, we summarize findings from systematic reviews of interventions and outcomes from family involvement in adult chronic disease care published between 2007 and 2016.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: More than 300,000 soldiers have returned from Southwest Asia (i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan) with combat-related mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBIs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIssues Ment Health Nurs
October 2014
Adult daughters face distinct challenges caring for parents with dementia and may experience compassion fatigue: the combination of helplessness, hopelessness, an inability to be empathic, and a sense of isolation resulting from prolonged exposure to perceived suffering. Prior research on compassion fatigue has focused on professional healthcare providers and has overlooked filial caregivers. This study attempts to identify and explore risk factors for compassion fatigue in adult daughter caregivers and to substantiate further study of compassion fatigue in family caregivers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough family home care problems are frequently described in the health care literature, the ways in which families and other informal caregivers manage those problems are not often addressed. We conducted a descriptive analysis of interviews in which spouses caring for a partner with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease were asked to describe difficult home care problems and how they managed those problems. Analysis of these interviews indicated three recurring management styles.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: One of the most common, yet most difficult to detect injuries sustained by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: mHealth interventions have shown promise for helping people sustain healthy behaviors such as weight loss. However, few have assessed treatment fidelity, that is, the accurate delivery, receipt, and enactment of the intervention. Treatment fidelity is critical because the valid interpretation and translation of intervention studies depend on treatment fidelity assessments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Using regulatory focus theory, an intervention of daily weight loss-sustaining messages was developed and tested for acceptability, feasibility, and efficacy on helping people sustain weight loss.
Methods: Participants (n = 120) were randomized to a promotion, prevention, or an attention-control text message group after completion of a weight loss program. Participants completed baseline assessments, and reported their weight at 1 and 3 months postbaseline.
Dementia caregiving can be burdensome with many challenges, especially for spousal caregivers who are elderly and may have limited resources and chronic conditions of their own. However, it can also be an opportunity for growth and transcendence. Thematic qualitative analysis was conducted with 11 caregiver interviews to investigate how spousal caregivers of individuals with dementia found personal meaning in their caregiving experience.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Mobile phone short message service (SMS) text messaging, has the potential to serve as an intervention medium to promote sustainability of weight loss that can be easily and affordably used by clinicians and consumers.
Objective: To develop theoretically driven weight loss sustaining text messages and pilot an mHealth SMS text messaging intervention to promote sustaining recent weight loss in order to understand optimal frequency and timing of message delivery, and for feasibility and usability testing. Results from the pilot study were used to design and construct a patient privacy compliant automated SMS application to deliver weight loss sustaining messages.
Res Gerontol Nurs
October 2012
Purpose Of The Study: This paper is a report of a study of the Assistance, Support, and Self-health Initiated through Skill Training (ASSIST) randomized control trial. The aim of this paper is to understand whether participating in ASSIST significantly changed the out-of-pocket (OOP) costs for family caregivers of Alzheimer's disease (AD) or Parkinson's disease (PD) patients.
Design And Methods: Secondary analysis of randomized control trial data, calculating average treatment effects of the intervention on OOP costs.
Background: Caregivers of people with dementia describe a wide spectrum of caregiving experiences, from very negative to very positive. Previous research reveals that differences exist, but how or why the experiences differ has not been well addressed.
Objective: The purpose of this study was to explore how the experiences of spousal caregivers of people with dementia differ.
Background: Two recent advances in the statistical methods for testing hypotheses about mediation effects are important for nursing science. First, bootstrap sampling distributions provide more accurate tests of hypotheses about mediated effects. Second, methods for testing statistical hypotheses about subgroup differences in mediation models (moderated mediation) are now well developed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe caregiving literature provides compelling evidence that caregiving burden and depressive symptoms are linked with stressful care relationships, however, relational difficulties around caregiving are seldom described in the literature. This article presents findings from content analysis of baseline interviews with 40 Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) spousal caregivers enrolled in a home care skill-training trial who identified their care relationship as a source of care burden. Disappointment and sadness about the loss of the relationship; tension within the relationship; and care decision conflicts within the relationship were recurrent themes of relational stress in caregiving.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: This paper presents findings from secondary analysis of longitudinal data on correlates of care relationship mutuality collected from 91 carers of people with Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease in the control group of a randomized trial of home-care skill training.
Background: Many family members and other informal carers are reported to suffer multiple adverse social, financial, psychological and physical caregiving outcomes. High levels of mutuality, the perception that the quality of the care relationship is positive, reportedly ameliorate these negative outcomes.
The primary purpose of this secondary analysis was to identify common themes from the statements of caregivers who ultimately decided to institutionalize their relative with Alzheimer or Parkinson disease. Content analysis of transcripts from caregivers (n=11) who institutionalized their relative during their participation in a caregiver intervention study was performed. Two categories identified from the caregivers' stories were anticipating the inevitable and reaching the limit.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Low mobility is common during hospitalization and is associated with adverse outcomes. Understanding barriers to the maintenance or improvement of mobility is important to the development of successful interventions.
Objectives: To identify barriers to mobility during hospitalization from the perspectives of older patients and their primary nurses and physicians, to compare and contrast the perceived barriers among these groups, and to make a conceptual model.
Appl Nurs Res
November 2006
This article discusses the pilot test of a psychoeducational intervention designed to improve the care skills, self-health skills, and resource-acquisition skills of caregivers of adults with Parkinson's disease. It describes the intervention and discusses specific feasibility issues explored in the pilot test as well as the modifications made in an ongoing randomized trial as a result of the pilot test. Recommendations for researchers who conduct interventions with older persons in community-based settings are included.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFParticipant attrition in randomized trials can reduce statistical power and bias outcomes. However, elective withdrawals are seldom discussed in trial reports. We examined factors associated with elective withdrawals for the first 131 Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) caregiver participants that entered Project ASSIST (Assistance, Support and Self-health Initiated through Skill Training), an on-going trial of caregiver skill training interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReworking a reduced budget after the award and monitoring and managing the budget once funds are received are critical to the success of a research project. Few resources are available to help principal investigators and research teams deal with these components of grant implementation. This article will address strategies and concerns related to the revision of the postaward budget and the implementation of the budget.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA convenience sample of 40 family members caring for an individual with either Alzheimer's disease (AD) or Parkinson's disease (PD) completed the Caregiver Assistance Measure (CAM) to identify the types of assistance that would be most helpful in caring for a family member at home. The CAM measures three categories or types of assistance: care knowledge and skills, self-care, and resource acquisition. Caregivers also completed open-ended questions about the difficulties and the satisfactions of caregiving.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Randomized trials have been criticized for being more protocol than participant-centered, with concerns raised about higher subject attrition and limited generalizability under controlled conditions. Informal caregivers are similar to other participants in community-based trials: many are unlikely to remain in a trial without procedural adaptations to meet some of their needs.
Purpose: This article discusses design and statistical strategies for tracking potential confounds associated with 3 participant-centered adaptations that may be made in community-based caregiver trials: tailoring multi-component interventions, using interpersonal contacts for participant maintenance, and non-blinding of trial participants.
The purposes of this study were to examine relationships among 3 of the American Nurses Association's 10 nursing-sensitive quality indicators: nursing hours per patient day, percentage of RNs, and nosocomial urinary tract infection (NUTI), and to identify the best predictor of NUTI in a hospital in Thailand. The results showed a negative relationship between nursing hours per patient day and NUTIs, indicating that with more nursing hours per day, there were fewer NUTI. These findings document the importance of nursing staff in minimizing hospital-acquired urinary tract infection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Thirty caregiving wives participated in a study of caregiving distress and negative mood (depressive symptoms) by making diary entries on stressful caregiving situations and collecting saliva samples 4 times a day. At the end of the 7-day study period, caregivers' salivary cortisol production was compared with their diary entries and correlated with pencil and paper self-report scores of caregiver distress and depressive symptoms.
Findings: Despite the inability to control a number of factors thought to confound cortisol production (exercise, smoking, alcohol ingestion, and prescription medications), there was a statistically significant difference between No Caregiving and Caregiving cortisol, F(1,739) = 7.