Yes / Health and care services for patients may improve or harm the wellbeing of their family carers. Formal consideration of these effects (also known as spillovers) in decision-making is advocated, but, to date, little is known about how they occur. This paper presents the first empirical study to determine the mechanisms by which health and care services affect family carers' wellbeing. The study focused on three major health conditions: dementia, stroke, and mental health. Focus groups and interviews were conducted with 49 purposefully sampled care professionals and family carers in the UK between December 2016 and September 2017. Transcripts were coded and analysed thematically, using descriptive accounts and an explanatory account. The analysis generated six over-arching mechanisms by which health and care services affect family carers' wellbeing, through: (i) information (degree to which service delivery informs and trains family carers); (ii) management of care (shifts of responsibility for care between formal and family sectors); (iii) patient outcomes (services changing patient outcomes); (iv) alienation (feelings of alienation or inclusion created by service delivery); (v) compliance (barriers to patients complying and engaging with services); and (vi) timing or location (changes in the timing or location of services). Each mechanism was associated with sub-themes relating to both positive and negative spillovers on the family carers. The six mechanisms can be summarised with the mnemonic ‘IMPACT’. The IMPACT mechanisms may be useful in designing and evaluating services to optimise the wellbeing of carers as well as patients. / Hareth Al-Janabi is funded by a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Career Development Fellowship (CDF-2015-08-025) for this research project. Mel Calvert is partially funded by the NIHR Birmingham Biomedical Research Centre and the NIHR Surgical Reconstruction and Microbiology Research Centre at the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Birmingham. This paper presents independent research funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/18146 |
| Date | 19 October 2020 |
| Creators | Al-Janabi, H., McLoughlin, C., Oyebode, Jan, Efstathiou, N., Calvert, M. |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Published version |
| Rights | © 2019 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the Creative Commons CC-BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), CC-BY |
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