Digital Psychological Wellbeing Interventions for Family Carers of Children and Adults With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: A Systematic Review.

The evidence base is heterogeneous, with varied study designs, interventions, and outcome measures, preventing a meta-analysis. Only one randomised controlled trial met six of seven quality criteria, and many studies were single-group pre-post designs with no control group. Data extraction and initial screening were not independently performed by two reviewers due to time and volume constraints. Google Translate was used to screen and extract data from non-English papers, which may have introduced minor inaccuracies. Most studies were conducted in the USA, and few included carers of adults, limiting generalisability to other cultural contexts or populations. No studies sought opinions from the people with intellectual and developmental disabilities themselves.

Funded by Cerebra. Two authors (S.F. and R.P.H.) were lead authors of one included study (Flynn et al. 2020) and R.P.H. was a co-author of another (Lunsky et al. 2021). These authors were excluded from the review process for the studies they were involved in to manage potential bias.

Do not assume that digital interventions are an effective clinical treatment for carer stress based on this review. The authors explicitly state that it is not possible to recommend any of the included interventions for practice because the evidence is emerging and of variable quality, with no single intervention showing strong support.