"This Is What Family Does": The Family Experience of Caring for Serious Illness.
Eric W Anderson, Katie M White
PMID 28662594WHAT IT FOUND
Families caring for someone with serious illness described becoming a team: they learned to seek information, advocate, and manage conflict, and they asked for encouragement and practical advice at each step.
Key findings
01Families described coming together, finding resources, and learning caregiving skills as central to the experience of serious illness.
02Getting support often required researching information and being assertive with health-care systems.
03Participants asked for ongoing encouragement and practical advice at each step of caregiving.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The authors state this was a secondary analysis of data collected from group interviews intended to gain insights for developing a new clinical model, not a direct solicitation about family experiences per se. Participants were recruited by a local public television station for recorded sessions intended for documentary use. The interviews were open-ended and designed to explore caregiving experiences, not to quantify how common each theme was. Comments not set in a family context were excluded, and professionals were coded only when they spoke from family experience. The study reported themes from 12 group interviews with 73 participants; it did not test an intervention or report patient outcomes.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The work was funded by a grant from the Robina Foundation.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the themes as proof that a family support model improves care. The study describes experiences from group interviews and did not test an intervention.