Spiritual and Emotional support of Primary Informal End-Of-Life Caregivers in Nova Scotia

Abstract

Palliative and end-of-life (EOL) care has been recognized as a priority area for improvement in the Canadian healthcare system for more than a decade, and calls for improvement of palliative and EOL services continue (1, 2). In Canada, EOL care tends to focus on the person who is dying, but it is important to remember that for nonprofessional informal caregivers, usually family and friends, the death of a loved one can be one of life’s most stressful events (3). In previous studies, patients’ family members have reported that their experience of EOL caregiving could have been improved by more communication and more emotional and spiritual support (4–8). Despite this, spiritual and emotional support for informal EOL caregivers in Canada is not well characterized in the literature. As part of a large, ongoing, population-based study examining the experience of care at the end of life among adults in Nova Scotia, Canada, this sub-study probed spiritual and emotional support of informal caregivers to help address the information gap. This article examines whether the amount of spiritual and emotional support received by informal EOL caregivers was as much as they desired, and whether differences in receipt of desired support were evident with respect to location of care and characteristics of the decedent and the informal caregiver.