Yes / and Health and social care may affect family carers’ health and wellbeing in addition to patients’ lives. It is recommended that such impacts (carer effects) are considered in decision-making. However, the scope of carer effects and range of decisions where carer effects should be considered is uncertain. This study aimed to identify (i) how different categories of healthcare and social care were perceived to impact on family carers and (ii) whether there was consensus about when carer effects should be formally considered in decision-making contexts.
Methods: A Delphi study was conducted with 65 UK-based participants with expertise in dementia, mental health, and stroke. Participants considered two broad forms of ‘interventions’ (patient treatment and replacement care) and two broad forms of ‘organisational change’ (staffing and changes in timing/location of care). Participants assessed the likely impacts of health and social care on family carers and whether impacts should be considered in decision-making. The survey was conducted remotely at two time points.
Results: Participants predicted widespread impacts from interventions and organisational changes on different domains of family carers’ lives, with ‘emotional health’ the most likely outcome to be affected. Patient treatment and replacement care services (‘interventions’) were associated with positive impacts across all domains. Conversely, timing/location changes and staffing changes (‘organisational changes’) were perceived to have mixed and negative impacts. There was widespread support (80-81%) for considering carer effects in research studies, funding decisions, and patient decision-making.
Conclusion: This study highlights a perception that carer effects are widespread and important to consider in economic evaluation and decision-making. It highlights the particular need to measure and value effects on carers’ emotional health and the need to use a societal perspective to avoid cost shifting to family carers when introducing interventions and making organisational changes. / This work was funded by a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Career Development Fellowship (CDF-2015-08-025) awarded to HA for this research project.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/18513 |
| Date | 03 June 2021 |
| Creators | Al-Janabi, H., Efstathiou, N., McLoughlin, C., Calvert, M., Oyebode, Jan |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Published version |
| Rights | © The Author(s). 2021 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
Page generated in 0.0135 seconds