The impact of the mySupport advance care planning intervention on family caregivers’ perceptions of decision-making and care for nursing home residents with dementia : pretest-posttest study in six countries

Bavelaar, Laura and Visser, Mandy and Walshe, Catherine and Preston, Nancy and Kaasalainen, Sharon and Sussman, Tamara and Cornally, Nicola and Hartigan, Irene and Loucka, Martin and de Giulio, Paola and Brazil, Kevin and Achterberg, Wilco and van der Steen, Jenny T. (2023) The impact of the mySupport advance care planning intervention on family caregivers’ perceptions of decision-making and care for nursing home residents with dementia : pretest-posttest study in six countries. Age and Ageing, 52 (3): afad027. ISSN 0002-0729

Text (Binder1)
Binder1.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.
Download (476kB)

Abstract

Background the mySupport advance care planning intervention was originally developed and evaluated in Northern Ireland (UK). Family caregivers of nursing home residents with dementia received an educational booklet and a family care conference with a trained facilitator to discuss their relative’s future care. Objectives to investigate whether upscaling the intervention adapted to local context and complemented by a question prompt list impacts family caregivers’ uncertainty in decision-making and their satisfaction with care across six countries. Second, to investigate whether mySupport affects residents’ hospitalisations and documented advance decisions. Design a pretest–posttest design. Setting in Canada, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK, two nursing homes participated. Participants in total, 88 family caregivers completed baseline, intervention and follow-up assessments. Methods family caregivers’ scores on the Decisional Conflict Scale and Family Perceptions of Care Scale before and after the intervention were compared with linear mixed models. The number of documented advance decisions and residents’ hospitalisations was obtained via chart review or reported by nursing home staff and compared between baseline and follow-up with McNemar tests. Results family caregivers reported less decision-making uncertainty (−9.6, 95% confidence interval: −13.3, −6.0, P  Conclusions the mySupport intervention may be impactful in countries beyond the original setting.