Perspectives of Mauritians living with neurological disability and their family caregivers during the COVID-19 lockdown: a thematic analysis from an African nation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Mauritians living with neurological disability face limited medical care, accessibility issues, and cultural stigma, which prevent community reintegration. We aimed to investigate the perspectives of Mauritians with neurological disability and their family caregivers during COVID-19 lockdown. Methods: following a phenomenological epistemology, this qualitative study employed an inductive reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with neurorehabilitation patients (N=18) and their primary caregivers (N=22). Patients with stroke (N=22), spinal cord injury (N=11), and traumatic brain injury (N=1) were included, excluding those who did not experience cognitive and/or physical disability. Results: the analysis developed six themes: (1) caregiver burnout: "I do everything"; (2) barriers to treatment: "the kind of care we get"; (3) poor social support: the disability taboo; (4) geographical barriers: a world not built for you; (5) financial burden: "sinking us into a hole"; and (6) isolation: a double-sided coin. Unexpectedly, lockdowns benefitted socially isolated patients, resulting in strengthened familial bonds, subjective gains in recovery, fewer experiences of stigma, and reduced fatigue. Rehabilitation care is limited, and patients lose motivation to pursue medical care. As a result, medical care was not highly affected by the COVID-19 lockdowns. Instead, shortages and rising prices of medication posed issues. Conclusion: the widespread lack of resources for patients on financial, rehabilitation, and social levels prevents patient return to the community and causes high rates of caregiver burnout. We recommend patient-centric strategies at the grassroots, community, and national levels to enhance accessibility, improve inclusivity, support caregivers, and reduce barriers to neurorehabilitation services.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".