LANCON C, SIMEONI MC, TOUMI M, AZORIN JM, AUQUIER P; International Society of Technology Assessment in Health Care. Meeting.

Annu Meet Int Soc Technol Assess Health Care Int Soc Technol Assess Health Care Meet. 2001; 17: abstract no. 256.

Department of Psychiatry, CHU Sainte Marguerite, Marseilles, France

Introduction - The detrimental effects of hospitalization and developments in psychopharmaceutical, psychotherapeutic and social treatments led to deinstitutionalization. Proxies of patients, relatives or friends, have had to learn to cope with care-giving tasks. Facilitating the coping of the caregivers should ensure a better quality or care giving, notably in terms of therapeutical observance. An exhaustive literature review found 9 instruments described for caregivers of schizophrenic patients. Five of them are self administered, but none of those covering mental, psychological and social fields have been widely validated and accepted within the scientific community, none are available in French. We report the first step of development of a specific instrument measuring the quality of life of non-institutional caregivers of schizophrenia patients, which should be multidimensional, self-administered and based on the caregiver' viewpoint.Methods - Face-to-face interviews were conducted with non-institutional caregivers of schizophrenia patients. Their content was analyzed to generate a large number of candidate items covering all-important aspects of caregivers' quality of life. Eighteen interviews were performed with caregivers: 11 mothers and 7 fathers, aged from 48 years to 71: the length of illness from 1 to 18 years.Results - Content analysis identified topics covering mental (worrying, emotional over-involvement, and suffering, guilt, fair of stigma, of future, loneliness, disillusion, anxiety, feeling of usefulness, self esteem...) physical (fatigue, disruption of sleep...) and social (relationships with the patient, friends, relatives, health workers, occupation, leisure...) fields. Negative as well as positive impact was identified.Conclusions - These results were compared to the domains assessed described in the literature. This step led to the generation of a set of about 100 questions and the validity of this questionnaire will be studied on 400 caregivers.

Publication Types:

• Meeting Abstracts

Keywords:

• Caregivers
• Family
• Humans
• Interviews as Topic
• Life
• Loneliness
• Quality of Life
• Questionnaires
• Residence Characteristics
• Schizophrenia
• Self Concept
• hsrmtgs

Other ID:

• GWHSR0002909

UI: 102274588

From Meeting Abstracts