Development of a Brief Assessment Scale for Caregivers of the Medically Ill

Abstract

Studies have documented high degrees of burden and negative outcomes for caregivers. The present study sought to develop a brief instrument for caregiver burden. An item pool was administered to 102 caregivers of patients with chronic illnesses (cancer, 55%; neurological, 15%; psychiatric 12%), along with measures of caregiver burden and quality of life. Item reduction was accomplished through content review and factor analysis. This yielded a 14-item Brief Assessment Scale for Caregivers (BASC) and an eight-item subscale measuring negative personal impact (NPI). Cronbach's alpha was 0.70 for the BASC and 0.80 for the NPI. Construct validity was confirmed by appropriate patterns of intercorrelation with other measures of caregiver burden. Higher burden was found for caregivers expected to have higher levels of distress (adult children caring for parents, P<0.005; female caregivers, P=0.035). These results support the validity of the BASC as a brief instrument for caregiver burden.

1715 Patient reported outcome measures for cancer caregivers: A systematic review

“…Some measures were developed relatively recently [10][11][12], five between 1980 and 1999 [13][14][15][16][17]. Two [10,13] measure caregiver appraisal specifically, with a theoretical underpinning from the stress and coping model of Lazarus and Folkman [18]; two were designed to measure subjective burden ± distress [12,17] (the Zarit Burden Interview was later revised [19]); three were multidimensional quality of life measures [11,14,16] and one a multidimensional measure of caregivers' reactions to caring for a family member [15]. Table 2 describes the ten studies reporting on the psychometric properties of the measures in the cancer caregiver population in terms of the instrument and version, study aim, population, setting country and number of participants.…”

“…No information pertaining to acceptability was provided by four studies [10,20,21,23]. In five studies, acceptability was appraised as only partially evidenced due to high dropout or incomplete data [11,12,14,15,22], surprising for the QOLLTI-F which had thoroughly tested acceptability in the development phase [11]. For the ACS [13], overall response rate was 74 % (including postal responses) and only 3/50 participants were eliminated due to missing data, suggesting the questionnaire was acceptable.…”

Measuring carer burden in informal carers of patients with long-term conditions

“…According to Glajchen et al (2015), long term caregiving can result in depression, social withdrawal, impaired quality of life or even increased mortality for the carer. Elderly carers are at a particular risk as often they have health problems themselves, although in most cases less severe than care recipients (Mosquera et al, 2016).…”

“…Other measures include: Caregiver Burden Inventory (CBI), Burden Scale for Family Caregivers (BSFC), Caregiver Reaction Assessment (CRA), Multidimensional Caregiver Strain Inventory (MCSI) and many others (Greenwell et al, 2015). Most of them have only been validated in relation to carers providing support with specific health conditions such as dementia, cancer and mental health conditions (Glajchen et al, 2015) and there appears to be a disagreement in the literature as to whether it is more effective to use disease-specific instruments (Humphrey et al, 2013) or generic tools to screen for and measure carer burden (Deeken et al, 2003).…”

What Is the Physician's Responsibility to a Patient's Family Caregiver?

“…• Pressures for early hospital discharge (the business plan and economic model for the modern hospital is the rapid turnover of beds to maximize reimbursement); • Reliance on hospitalists who, while managing most hospital-based care, often do not know the patient or the family very well, leading to discharge plans that may reflect little knowledge of the actual situation at home; • Fragmented social programs for home care that are a patchwork of federal, state, and local programs with barriers in the form of special requirements, preconditions, limitations, and caps; • The low-status, low-pay, high-turnover nature of home health care (of nearly 2 million home care workers in 2013, almost 40 percent received government benefits, e.g., food stamps or Medicaid [9]), which diminishes the likelihood of a stable home health care workforce with the high levels of professionalism and morale required for this difficult and important job.…”