Online interventions to support family caregivers: The value of community-engaged research practices

Abstract

Family members provide significant amounts of unpaid care to aging, chronically ill, and disabled persons in their homes. They often do this with little education or support and commonly report feeling overwhelmed and stressed. Providing education and support to family caregivers has demonstrated benefit on the health and well-being of the caregiver and care-receiver. However, because “caregiver” is not a reimbursable category in health care, caregiver interventions need to be delivered in a cost-efficient way. Technology-delivered and self-administered intervention models are increasingly being recommended as a pragmatic way to support aging families in our communities. This paper outlines the redevelopment of two behavioral interventions to an exclusively online delivery. This case-study analysis presents a model for community-engaged intervention research practices, which have the potential to create interventions that are more sustainable and more likely to be implemented than those designed and tested with more traditional research methodology.

Keywords:

• Family caregivers
• behavioral interventions
• online/mobile delivery
• community-engaged research

Acknowledgements

We thank the many community stakeholders who participated in the development of the SupportGroove and Time for Living and Caring interventions and research studies.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no financial conflicts of interest or other benefits associated with the publication of this research.

Data availability statement

The data are available from the authors by request.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for these studies were provided by National Institute on Aging [R01AG061946—Utz], the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research [R03HD091432—Terrill], and the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation [PSR #440547—Terrill].