Evaluación de la efectividad de un programa de intervención en cuidadores no profesionales de personas dependientes en el ámbito de la atención primaria

OBJECTIVE: Evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention to family caregivers. DESIGN: Quasi-experimental study of type before/after, without control group. SETTING: Primary care; 5 primary care centers of Castelló city. PERIOD: Between the month of January 2018 and the month of January 2019. PARTICIPANTS: 72 family caregivers, participants in a specific intervention recently implemented in the Department de Salut de Castelló. INTERVENTION: Training to family caregivers, seeking to improve knowledge of dependent care, and provide support. Ten group sessions of 120 minutes. PRINCIPAL MEASUREMENTS: Descriptive of sociodemographic data. Comparison of the variables overload, low back pain, social support and health-related quality of life before-after the intervention. Variable response: caregiver overload. Bivariate and multivariate analysis. RESULTS: All family caregivers had baseline overload (59.93 ± 14.71); 73.3% showed low back pain, with an average level of 5.13 ± 2.56 and moderate disability (41.7%). 50% received little social support and a great impact on health-related quality of life, especially in terms of pain and anxiety. After the intervention, there was a significant improvement (P = .004) in social support, as well as positive descriptive changes in disability due to low back pain and health-related quality of life dimensions. No progress was found (P > .05) for the presence and level of low back pain, as well as overload levels. CONCLUSIONS: The resulting effective intervention to improve perceived social support. However, the low impact on other variables suggests reconsidering its contents, as well as encouraging new prospective studies that may offer more encouraging results.