Consensus-Based Safety Recommendations for Informal Home Care: A Mixed Methods Study.
Nida Abed, Vanessa Ribeiro Neves, Valerie Matarredona Perez and 7 others
PMID 41983590WHAT IT FOUND
Experts generated 288 safety recommendations for informal home care, covering tasks like medication storage and fall prevention.
These are consensus-based suggestions for future testing, not proven interventions, and have not yet been evaluated for real-world effectiveness or caregiver usability.
Key findings
01The final output consists of 288 safety recommendations addressing 213 effects, derived from 147 failure modes across 53 home care procedures.
02The recommendations are expert-based and have not been tested with end users in home care settings; their real-world effectiveness has not been evaluated.
03Informal caregivers and care recipients were not included in the development or appraisal of these recommendations, so implementability is based on professional judgment rather than demonstrated caregiver usability.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study did not include informal caregivers or care recipients, so the recommendations reflect professional judgment rather than tested usability or acceptability by the actual users. The expert panel was small (13 people) and geographically limited to one region in Spain, which may restrict the generalizability of the findings to other cultural or healthcare contexts. The real-world effectiveness of the proposed strategies has not been evaluated; these are theoretical risk-management proposals that require future pilot testing and outcome evaluation. The study did not assess the burden or feasibility of implementing these recommendations from the caregiver's perspective, only from the experts' perception.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret these 288 recommendations as evidence-based interventions that have been shown to improve patient safety or caregiver outcomes. They are expert consensus proposals that have not yet been tested for real-world effectiveness, usability, or impact on adverse events.