Healthcare providers can help improve communication with these women by actively seeking to meet their support needs and educating families so that provisional support is more meaningful and diabetes management more attainable.
This grounded theory study report describes the experience of 34 Mexican American (MA) female caregivers who provided care to a family member with cancer. Caregivers identified a process of "Becoming Stronger" as a result of their caregiver role. The emerging theoretical model of female MA cancer caregiving offers evidence to change current cancer care approaches from patient-focused to family-focused care for this ethnic group. Findings suggest that changes most responsive to cultural values and likely to provide accessible and quality cancer care for MA families are those that involve active partnering with MA caregivers to prioritize the patient's cancer care.
Female family caregivers of various global cultures provide basic care in health, social, emotional, and financial domains for family members with cancer and may sacrifice their own health to do so. To learn about role-related mood, health status self-perceptions, and burden of one cultural group, we used qualitative and quantitative approaches to study 34 Mexican American (MA) women who provided care for an ill family member with cancer. We report quantitative data on study variables and make comparisons with caregiver qualitative reports. Implications for health planning, service delivery, and future research with underserved, minority female caregivers are presented.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.