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Do informal caregivers for elderly in the community use support measures? A qualitative study in five European countries
BACKGROUND: Informal caregivers are essential figures for maintaining frail elderly at home. Providing informal care can affect the informal caregivers’ physical and psychological health and labour market participation capabilities. They need support to prevent caregiver burden. A variety of existin...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4947246/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27423182 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-016-1487-2 |
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author | Willemse, Evi Anthierens, Sibyl Farfan-Portet, Maria Isabel Schmitz, Olivier Macq, Jean Bastiaens, Hilde Dilles, Tinne Remmen, Roy |
author_facet | Willemse, Evi Anthierens, Sibyl Farfan-Portet, Maria Isabel Schmitz, Olivier Macq, Jean Bastiaens, Hilde Dilles, Tinne Remmen, Roy |
author_sort | Willemse, Evi |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Informal caregivers are essential figures for maintaining frail elderly at home. Providing informal care can affect the informal caregivers’ physical and psychological health and labour market participation capabilities. They need support to prevent caregiver burden. A variety of existing support measures can help the caregiver care for the elderly at home, but with some limitations. The objective of this review was to explore the experiences of informal caregivers caring for elderly in the community with the use of supportive policy measures in Belgium and compare these to the experiences in other European countries. METHODS: An empirical qualitative case study research was conducted in five European countries (Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, France and Germany). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with informal caregivers and their dependent elderly. Interview data from the different cases were analysed. In particular data from Belgium was compared to data from the cases abroad. RESULTS: Formal services (e.g. home care) were reported to have the largest impact on allowing the caregiver to care for the dependent elderly at home. One of the key issues in Belgium is the lack of timely access to reliable information about formal and informal services in order to proactively support the informal caregiver. Compared to the other countries, informal caregivers in Belgium expressed more difficulties in accessing support measures and navigating through the health system. In the other countries information seemed to be given more timely when home care was provided via care packages. CONCLUSION: To support the informal caregiver, who is the key person to support the frail elderly, fragmentation of information regarding supportive policy measures is an important issue of concern. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-016-1487-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4947246 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-49472462016-07-17 Do informal caregivers for elderly in the community use support measures? A qualitative study in five European countries Willemse, Evi Anthierens, Sibyl Farfan-Portet, Maria Isabel Schmitz, Olivier Macq, Jean Bastiaens, Hilde Dilles, Tinne Remmen, Roy BMC Health Serv Res Research Article BACKGROUND: Informal caregivers are essential figures for maintaining frail elderly at home. Providing informal care can affect the informal caregivers’ physical and psychological health and labour market participation capabilities. They need support to prevent caregiver burden. A variety of existing support measures can help the caregiver care for the elderly at home, but with some limitations. The objective of this review was to explore the experiences of informal caregivers caring for elderly in the community with the use of supportive policy measures in Belgium and compare these to the experiences in other European countries. METHODS: An empirical qualitative case study research was conducted in five European countries (Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, France and Germany). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with informal caregivers and their dependent elderly. Interview data from the different cases were analysed. In particular data from Belgium was compared to data from the cases abroad. RESULTS: Formal services (e.g. home care) were reported to have the largest impact on allowing the caregiver to care for the dependent elderly at home. One of the key issues in Belgium is the lack of timely access to reliable information about formal and informal services in order to proactively support the informal caregiver. Compared to the other countries, informal caregivers in Belgium expressed more difficulties in accessing support measures and navigating through the health system. In the other countries information seemed to be given more timely when home care was provided via care packages. CONCLUSION: To support the informal caregiver, who is the key person to support the frail elderly, fragmentation of information regarding supportive policy measures is an important issue of concern. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-016-1487-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2016-07-16 /pmc/articles/PMC4947246/ /pubmed/27423182 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-016-1487-2 Text en © The Author(s). 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. 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. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Willemse, Evi Anthierens, Sibyl Farfan-Portet, Maria Isabel Schmitz, Olivier Macq, Jean Bastiaens, Hilde Dilles, Tinne Remmen, Roy Do informal caregivers for elderly in the community use support measures? A qualitative study in five European countries |
title | Do informal caregivers for elderly in the community use support measures? A qualitative study in five European countries |
title_full | Do informal caregivers for elderly in the community use support measures? A qualitative study in five European countries |
title_fullStr | Do informal caregivers for elderly in the community use support measures? A qualitative study in five European countries |
title_full_unstemmed | Do informal caregivers for elderly in the community use support measures? A qualitative study in five European countries |
title_short | Do informal caregivers for elderly in the community use support measures? A qualitative study in five European countries |
title_sort | do informal caregivers for elderly in the community use support measures? a qualitative study in five european countries |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4947246/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27423182 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-016-1487-2 |
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