Abstract
Background Home care teams ensure that essential palliative medicine services are available at the Patient's doorstep. The complexities accompanying the duties of a caregiver in provision of holistic palliative and end of life care in these circumstances are underlined by the existence of psychological issues such as caregiver burden and distress, unique to this population. Re-dressal of these psychological constructs, which have the potential to impact the family's perception of effectiveness of services is an important responsibility of the home care service provider. Methods A questionnaire based upon themes of purview, scope and composition of Home care services was administered during a visit undertaken as part of month long posting in a Non-governmental organization. Caregiver opinion on issues such as frequency, timing and duration of visits and preferences in addition to important domains of patient care were sought. Results A total of 9 caregivers provided their consent for the interview. There was a reasonable degree of resonance with the idea that the Home care team should stock essential drugs, general agreement that the services being rendered were essential to the patient and their caregivers, acceptance that the frequency of visits remain once a week, due acknowledgement of the central role of the accompanying doctor and importance of a social worker during the visit. Majority (8/9) of those interviewed, agreed that the Home care team should be lead by a doctor, while, a similar number concurred that affilation to an NGO provided a more human face to the endeavour. However, there was a lack of consensus on the appropriateness of weekend visits, optimum time spent per visit (limiting the total duration of interaction with the patient and family to a maximum of 15 minutes had only 3 takers), acceptability of maintaining a drug diary and need for the same doctor to accompany the team on consecutive visits. Conclusions Guidelines are yet to address the duties and responsibilities of the Physician providing Home care services. Outreach programmes, which provide an opportunity to impart quality caregiver education, cater to a well defined population and involve the close participation of the Local health functionaries could help build momentum in the right direction.
Citation Format: Rahul D. Arora. Survey aimed at understanding caregiver attitudes towards components of an effective home care service [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Virtual Conference: Thirteenth AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2020 Oct 2-4. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2020;29(12 Suppl):Abstract nr PO-113.
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