Adaptation of a psycho-educational group programme to improve coping in dementia caregiving: a feasibility study with mixed-methods
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: As the number of people living with dementia rapidly increases worldwide, the support provided by their informal caregivers remains key to the sustainability of most healthcare systems, this voluntary contribution representing 40% of the costs of dementia worldwide. Informal caregiving in dementia, however, is linked to long periods of chronic stress with frequent and serious negative consequences on the health and quality of life of the caregiver. A psycho-educational group intervention focusing on coping with the daily stress of dementia caregiving ("Learning to feel better… to help better"), developed in French-speaking Canada and showing broad effects on quality of life, was selected with the aim of 1) adapting it to a new cultural context (French-speaking Switzerland) based on identified facilitators and barriers, using a participative approach; and 2) conducting a feasibility study to evaluate whether the adapted programme showed similar or improved feasibility and effects compared to the original Canadian programme. METHODS: A mixed-methods concurrent nested design was used to evaluate the feasibility and the effects on five quantitative core outcomes. Additional qualitative data helped document in depth the acceptability and impact of the intervention. RESULTS: We shortened the programme from 30 to 21 h in total, which resulted in increased accessibility, in terms of facilitated recruitment of participants and inclusion of a broader range of informal caregivers. There were significant reductions in subjective burden (effect size: d = -0.32) and psychological distress (d = -0.48), as well as decreases in the stress reactions of informal caregivers related to the behaviour problems of the persons with dementia (d = -0.57). The qualitative results emphasized the usefulness of providing informal caregivers with structured procedures for efficiently tackling everyday challenges, and of enabling learning through a variety of channels and activities. CONCLUSIONS: Substantial improvements are associated with this 21-h group intervention, organised in 7 sessions of 3 h each, focused on learning more efficient strategies to cope with the daily stress of dementia caregiving. This intervention empowered informal caregivers to master their daily challenges with more confidence, satisfaction and calm. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN13512408 (registration date 17.05.2021, retrospectively registered).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".