Caregiver Support Model & Psycho-Education Program On Empowerment: Development and Validation

City University of Hong Kong

Status: Unknown

Conditions: Caregiver Burnout; Case Management; Empowerment

Treatments: Behavioral: Caregiver Support Model; Behavioral: Psycho-education Program

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04272918

Carer Project

Details and patient eligibility

About

This Project aims to provide social workers and relevant human service professionals with a comprehensive, scientific, and validated service model and suggest a sustainable support framework on the working process of helping and empowering family caregivers of frail elders, reducing caregiving distress, and enhancing caregivers' quality of life.

The proposed Project consists of two parts to be conducted in 1 year. The first part focuses on the development and validation of Caregiver Support Model (CSM) with a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) study. The second part develops and validates a psycho-education program on empowering family caregivers with another Randomized Controlled design. In the first year, the Project Team have (1) developed and designed different components of the Caregiver Support Model (CSM), including a comprehensive need assessment tool, personalized Caregiver Intervention Plan Guidelines and Template, and online database on caregiver services and community resources, (2) designed a five-session psycho-education program on empowerment. The Caregiver Needs Assessment (CNA) tool was also pilot-tested with 320 community caregivers. Results from the survey, together with the systematic review on caregiver support, will form the backbone of the later CNA implementation. The working model will be validated using RCT design with 400 family caregivers recruited through 4 collaborating NGOs. At the same time, a psycho-education program on empowerment will be developed and validated using RCT design with another 190 caregivers.

Full description

Participants of CSM will be randomly assigned to CSM intervention and non-CSM intervention which is the usual practice of case handling by centre staff. Randomization will be based on centres to prevent exchange of information between the two groups, and thus causing contamination. Outcome data will be measured at 3 time-intervals: case intake, 3-month, and 6-month.

Participants of the psychoeducation program on empowerment (PPE) will be randomly assigned to the program group and the non-program group. For the former a 5-session psychoeducation program will be administered. For both groups, outcome measures will be collected at pre, post, and 3-month after post test.

Enrollment: 590 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 21+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

CSM Inclusion Criteria:

• Primary family caregivers aged 21 or above;
• Have not received major/ intensive services in the past three months;
• Providing care for elderly aged 60 or older;
• Care recipient has at least one difficulty in activities of daily living or instrumental activities of daily living that needs help from the caregiver (scored 3 or higher on at least one of the items in the ADL/IADL Checklist).

PPE Inclusion Criteria:

• Primary family caregivers aged 21 or above;
• Family caregiving in stable situation or care recipient passed away within 2 years;
• Have not received systematic psychoeducation in the past three months.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Sequential Assignment

Masking: Double Blind

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590 participants in 4 patient groups

CSM condition

Experimental group

Description:

Social Worker 1 of CSM conditions will work with caregivers according to the guidelines and template of the Care Support Model, including the formulation of the intervention plan based on CNA scores of different need domains, the use of the caregiver intervention plan template, service matching drawing reference from caregiver resource database, service formulation based on CNA scores of different strength domains, the use of the case monitoring template and guideline.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Caregiver Support Model

Non-CSM condition

No Intervention group

Description:

Social Worker 2 of the Control Group will not be notified of the CNA scores of his/her caregivers. The intervention plan, services assignment and case management of participants of the control group will be based on Social Worker 2's own judgement using the information shared by the caregivers, and the social worker's own observation.

PP-E condition

Experimental group

Description:

Experimental Group will be led a consultant who is an expert, with the help of a degree-holder social worker to facilitate capacity building, empowerment and long-term well-being. Measurement of outcome variables will be conducted before the start of the program, at the end of the program, and 3 months after the program ended.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Psycho-education Program

Non PP-E condition

No Intervention group

Description:

Measurement of outcome variables will be conducted at the same point of time as PP-E condition. There will be no treatment or intervention for the control group.