Providing Informal Care in Terminal Illness

Jane Hall, Patricia Kenny, Ishrat Hossain, Deborah J. Street and Stephanie Knox

Medical Decision Making, 2014, vol. 34, issue 6, 731-745

Abstract: Background : The trend for terminally ill patients to receive much of their end-of-life care at home necessitates the design of services to facilitate this. Care at home also requires that informal care be provided by family members and friends. This study investigated informal carers’ preferences for support services to aid the development of end-of-life health care services. Methods : This cross-sectional study used 2 discrete choice experiments to ascertain the preferences of carers supporting patients with different levels of care need, determined by the assistance needed with personal care and labeled High Care (HC) and Low Care (LC). The sample included 168 informal carers of people receiving palliative care at home from 2 palliative care services in Sydney, Australia. Data were collected in face-to-face interviews; carers chose between 2 hypothetical plans of support services and their current services. Data were analyzed with generalized multinomial logit models that were used to calculate the impact of each attribute on the probability of a carer choosing a service plan. Results : Preferred support included nursing services; the probability of choosing a plan increased significantly if it included nurse home visits and phone advice ( P

Keywords: informal care; preferences; discrete choice; palliative care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272989X13500719 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:medema:v:34:y:2014:i:6:p:731-745

DOI: 10.1177/0272989X13500719

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Medical Decision Making
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().