Abstract NS8: Effectiveness of a Caregiver-Centered Empowerment Program for Chinese Stroke Family Caregivers

Abstract

Background: Family caregivers play a crucial role in providing long-term home care to stroke survivors. Identifying an effective intervention is needed to meet the demands of stroke family caregivers. We developed a 13-week Caregiver-centered Empowerment Program (CEP), which is guided by empowerment process theory, to enhance the self-care and ability of family caregivers to cope with stroke caregiving. Objective To examine the effects of CEP (two 60 min in-patient face-to-face sessions and six biweekly 30 min phone follow-ups) compared with usual care (UC) in terms of self-efficacy (SE), caregiving competence (CCS), health promoting behavior, adaptive coping, social support, caregiver burden and quality of life (QOL) of caregivers, and the use of health and social services among stroke survivors. Methods: In this randomized controlled trial, Mainland Chinese stroke family caregivers (mean age=53 years; 61% women) received 13 weeks of CEP+UC (n=72) or UC only (n=72). Generalized estimating equations were used to assess the changes in SE, CCS, health promoting behavior, coping, social support, caregiver burden and QOL of caregivers, and the use of health and social services between groups of stroke survivors over time (baseline=T0, immediate=T1, and 1-month post-intervention=T2) using the intention-to-treat concept. Results: Compared with the participants in the UC group, members of the CEP+UC group exhibited significantly better SE, CCS, health-promoting behavior, adaptive coping, and perceived social support and a lower level of caregiving burden (see Table 1). Changes in the QOL of caregivers and hospital readmission of stroke survivors and nursing home placement rates showed no significant difference over time between groups. Attrition was low at 17%. Conclusions: CEP is easily implemented and can be incorporated in existing stroke rehabilitation services to foster support for family caregivers in providing long-term community care to stroke survivors.