Caregiver Burden Is Reduced by Social Support Services for Non-Dependent Elderly Persons: Pre-Post Study of 569 Caregivers

BACKGROUND

Informal care provided by family caregivers (FCGs) to elderly persons is associated with a high risk of burden and poor health status. Social support services (3S) for the elderly persons were characterized by assistance in various activities of daily living. This study aimed to analyze the impact of 3S on the burden of FCGs of elderly persons living in the community and identify factors associated with changes in their burden.

METHODS

This pre-post study was performed in the southeast of France: FCGs of non-dependent elderly persons still living at home who received a 3S were consecutively included. FCG burden was assessed with the Mini-Zarit scale before the setting up of the 3S (pre-3S) and 6 months after (post-3S).

RESULTS

A total of 569 FCGs were included in the study. Mean age of the FCGs was 62.9 years old (±13.3), 67% were women, 61.2% were children or stepchildren. Burden was present for 81% of FCGs. In most cases, 3S targeted household chores (95.8%); 59.8% of elderly persons and their FCGs were fully satisfied. The improvement in burden was greater for FCGs perceiving less obstacles post-3S in helping elderly persons (OR = 4.083) but also for FCGs fully satisfied with the 3S (OR = 2.809) and for FCGs whose perceived health status had improved post-3S (OR = 2.090).

CONCLUSIONS

FCGs of non-dependent elderly persons experience a burden similar to those of dependent elderly persons. The implementation of a 3S in daily life helps to reduce their burden.

Personalized Care Plan for non dependent old persons decrease significantly caregivers’ burden

Objectives

Informal care provided by family caregivers in old persons is associated to a high risk of burden and poor health status. This study aimed to analyze the impact of a Personal Care Plan (PCP) attributed to non dependant old persons living in the community on caregiver burden, satisfaction and frailty.

Methods

This non interventional longitudinal study was performed in the south East area of in France: olds persons asking for a PCP (>70 years old, with no disability and no severe chronic disease, living at home) and their caregiver were included with a 6-months follow up. Dyads were visited at home by social workers. Caregivers Burden has been assessed with Mini-Zarit and frailty status with FiND (Frail Non-Disable).

Results

876 dyads (old persons: female 77.6%, aged 82.2 ± 5.8 years old; caregivers: 64.5% female, 29% spouse, 61% children; 64% with frailty and 38% with high burden; high burden being significantly associated with frailty) were eligible for a PCP. Among them, 564 PCP were financed, mainly: housekeeping and meal preparation. For those old persons who had PCP, near half of their caregiver decreased the time spent to these activities. With the PAP, 88% of the caregiver had a lower burden level, only 6% had a persistent high burden; 61,5% were totally satisfied. Frailty status was not modified.

Discussion

Our study highlight that the burden occurs also in non dependent old persons’s caregivers. Social support implementation for activity of daily living had a major impact on the burden but not on the caregiver frailty, which means that determinants of caregiver’s frailty are more complex and further studies are needed.

Key messages

Social support implementation for activity of daily living have a major impact on the burden; the burden occurs also in non dependent old persons’s caregivers. Personalized plan implemented to support activity of daily living improve caregiver burden even in non-dependent old persons.

Caregivers of non-dependent old person: perceived loneliness is associated with poor health status

Objectives

Informal care has poor effects on caregivers’ health status. Several studies targeted informal caregivers of dependent or severely ill old persons. But, few of them analysed non-dependent old persons caregivers and their perceived loneliness. We hypothesized that perceived loneliness is an independent factor that worsen the caregiver burden and perceived health status. The aim of this study is to analyze factors associated to the perceived loneliness of caregivers of the non-dependent old persons.

Methods

A Cross-sectional study has been conducted among 876 dyads. Old persons over 70 years of age, non-dependent, living at home and their caregiver eligible for social support by retirement and occupational health insurance in South-east of France were included. Caregivers were assessed by the Mini-Zarit Scale for the burden, and with 5-point -Likert scales for loneliness and perceived health status. A multivariate logistic regression model was performed to analyze explanatory variables related to loneliness.

Results

Characteristics of the caregivers were: 64.5% female, 29% spouse, 61% children; 64% with frailty and 38% with high burden, 10.5% of them felt often or always lonely. Loneliness was positively associated to (OR; CI 95%): caregiver’s poor health status (3.40; 1.60-7.23), burden (4.06; 1.99-8.27), sleep disorders (3.75; 1.85-7.60), anxiety (6.64; 3.23-13.65) and a bad relationship with the old persons (2.17; 1.11-4.25). Loneliness was negatively associated to a good family support (0.33; 0.17-0.63) and living alone (0.34; 0.16-0.76).

Discussion

Loneliness should be differentiated from social isolation. Caregivers loneliness is not very frequent but highly correlated to a poor health status perception. Thus, it is essential that health care providers assess for caregivers’ perceived loneliness to implement specifics supporting actions to improve health status.

Key messages

Caregivers loneliness is not very frequent but highly correlated to a poor health status perception. It is essential that health care providers assess for caregivers’ perceived loneliness to implement specifics supporting actions to improve health status.

End-stage renal disease treated in Provence-Alpes Côte d'Azur: 12-years follow-up and forecast to the year 2030

BACKGROUND

This study describes the time trend of renal replacement therapy for end-stage renal disease (ESRD) in the Provence-Alpes Côte d'Azur region (PACA) between 2004 and 2015, and forecasts up to 2030.

METHODS

A longitudinal study was conducted on all ESRD patients treated in PACA and recorded in the French Renal Epidemiology and Information Network (REIN) during this period. Time trends and forecasts to 2030 were analyzed using Poisson regression models.

RESULTS

Since 2004, the number of new patients has steadily increased by 3.4% per year (95% CI, 2.8-3.9, p < 0.001) and the number of patients receiving RRT has increased by 3.7% per year (RR 1.037, 95% CI: 1.034-1.039, p < 0.001). If these trends continue, the PACA region will be face with 7371 patients on dialysis and 3891 with a functional renal transplant who will need to be managed in 2030. The two most significant growth rates were the percentage of obese people (RR 1.140, 95% CI: 1.131-1.149, p < 0.001) and those with diabetes (RR 1.070, 95% CI; 1.064-1.075, p < 0.001).

CONCLUSION

This study highlights the increase in the number of ESRD patients over 12 years, with no prospect of stabilization. These findings allow us to anticipate the quality and quantity of care offered and to propose more preventive measures to combat obesity and diabetes.

Malnutrition: a highly predictive risk factor of short-term mortality in elderly presenting to the emergency department

OBJECTIVES

To identify independent risk factors of mortality among elderly patients in the 3 months after their visit (T3) to an emergency department (ED).

DESIGN

Prospective cohort study.

SETTING

University hospital ED in an urban setting in France.

PARTICIPANTS

One hundred seventy-three patients aged 75 and older were admitted to the ED over two weeks (18.7% of the 924 ED visits). Of these, 164 patients (94.8%) were included in our study, and 157 (95.7%) of them were followed three months after their ED visit.

MEASUREMENTS

During the inclusion period (T0), a standardized questionnaire was used to collect data on socio-demographic and environmental characteristics, ED visit circumstances, medical conditions and geriatric assessment including functional and nutritional status. Three months after the ED visits (T3), patients or their caregivers were interviewed to collect data on vital status, and ED return or hospitalization.

RESULTS

Among the 157 patients followed at T3, 14.6% had died, 19.9% had repeated ED visits, and 63.1% had been hospitalized. The two independent predictive factors for mortality within the 3 months after ED visit were: malnutrition screened by the Mini Nutritional Assessment short-form (MNA-SF) (OR=20.2; 95% CI: 5.74-71.35; p<.001) and the Cumulative Illness Rating Scale for Geriatrics (CIRS-G) score (OR=1.1; 95% CI: 1.01-1.22; p=.024).

CONCLUSION

Malnutrition is the strongest independent risk factor predicting short-term mortality in elderly patients visiting the ED, and it was easily detected by MNA-SF and supported from the ED visit.

Nonurgent patients in emergency departments: rational or irresponsible consumers? Perceptions of professionals and patients

Background

For several decades, overcrowding in emergency departments (EDs) has been intensifying due to the increased number of patients seeking care in EDs. Demand growth is partly due to misuse of EDs by patients who seek care for nonurgent problems. This study explores the reasons why people with nonurgent complaints choose to come to EDs, and how ED health professionals perceive the phenomenon of “nonurgency”.

Results

Semi-structured interviews were conducted in 10 EDs with 87 nonurgent patients and 34 health professionals. Interviews of patients revealed three themes: (1) fulfilled health care needs, (2) barriers to primary care providers (PCPs), and (3) convenience. Patients chose EDs as discerning health consumers: they preferred EDs because they had difficulties obtaining a rapid appointment. Access to technical facilities in EDs spares the patient from being overwhelmed with appointments with various specialists. Four themes were identified from the interviews of health professionals: (1) the problem of defining a nonurgent visit, (2) explanations for patients’ use of EDs for nonurgent complaints, (3) consequences of nonurgent visits, and (4) solutions to counter this tendency.

Conclusions

Studies on the underlying reasons patients opt for the ED, as well as on their decision-making process, are lacking. The present study highlighted discrepancies between the perceptions of ED patients and those of health professionals, with a special focus on patient behaviour. To explain the use of ED, health professionals based themselves on the acuity and urgency of medical problems, while patients focused on rational reasons to initiate care in the ED (accessibility to health care resources, and the context in which the medical problem occurred). In spite of some limitations due to the slightly outdated nature of our data, as well as the difficulty of categorizing nonurgent situations, our findings show the importance of conducting a detailed analysis of the demand for health care. Understanding it is crucial, as it is the main determining factor in the utilization of health care resources, and provides promising insights into the phenomenon of ED usage increase. For reforms to be successful, the process of decision-making for unscheduled patients will have to be thoroughly investigated.

Be careful with triage in emergency departments: interobserver agreement on 1,578 patients in France

BACKGROUND

For several decades, emergency departments (EDs) utilization has increased, inducing ED overcrowding in many countries. This phenomenon is related partly to an excessive number of nonurgent patients. To resolve ED overcrowding and to decrease nonurgent visits, the most common solution has been to triage the ED patients to identify potentially nonurgent patients, i.e. which could have been dealt with by general practitioner. The objective of this study was to measure agreement among ED health professionals on the urgency of an ED visit, and to determine if the level of agreement is consistent among different sub-groups based on following explicit criteria: age, medical status, type of referral to the ED, investigations performed in the ED, and the discharge from the ED.

METHODS

We conducted a multicentric cross-sectional study to compare agreement between nurses and physicians on categorization of ED visits into urgent or nonurgent. Subgroups stratified by criteria characterizing the ED visit were analyzed in relation to the outcome of the visit.

RESULTS

Of 1,928 ED patients, 350 were excluded because data were lacking. The overall nurse-physician agreement on categorization was moderate (kappa = 0.43). The levels of agreement within all subgroups were variable and low. The highest agreement concerned three subgroups of complaints: cranial injury (kappa = 0.61), gynaecological (kappa = 0.66) and toxicology complaints (kappa = 1.00). The lowest agreement concerned two subgroups: urinary-nephrology (kappa = 0.09) and hospitalization (kappa = 0.20). When categorization of ED visits into urgent or nonurgent cases was compared to hospitalization, ED physicians had higher sensitivity and specificity than nurses (respectively 94.9% versus 89.5%, and 43.1% versus 30.9%).

CONCLUSIONS

The lack of physician-nurse agreement and the inability to predict hospitalization have important implications for patient safety. When urgency screening is used to determine treatment priority, disagreement might not matter because all patients in the ED are seen and treated. But using assessments as the basis for refusal of care to potential nonurgent patients raises legal, ethical, and safety issues. Managed care organizations should be cautious when applying such criteria to restrict access to EDs.

Nonurgent patients in the emergency department? A French formula to prevent misuse

BACKGROUND

Overcrowding in emergency department (EDs) is partly due to the use of EDs by nonurgent patients. In France, the authorities responded to the problem by creating primary care units (PCUs): alternative structures located near hospitals. The aims of the study were to assess the willingness of nonurgent patients to be reoriented to a PCU and to collect the reasons that prompted them to accept or refuse.

METHODS

We carried out a cross sectional survey on patients' use of EDs. The study was conducted in a French hospital ED. Patients were interviewed about their use of health services, ED visits, referrals, activities of daily living, and insurance coverage status. Patients' medical data were also collected.

RESULTS

85 patients considered nonurgent by a triage nurse were asked to respond to a questionnaire. Sex ratio was 1.4; mean age was 36.3 +/- 11.7 years.Most patients went to the ED autonomously (76%); one third (31.8%) had consulted a physician. The main reasons for using the ED were difficulty to get an appointment with a general practitioner (22.3%), feelings of pain (68.5%), and the availability of medical services in the ED, like imaging, laboratory tests, and drug prescriptions (37.6%). Traumatisms and wounds were the main medical reasons for going to the ED (43.5%).More than two-thirds of responders (68%) were willing to be reoriented towards PCUs. In the multivariate analysis, only employment and the level of urgency perceived by the patient were associated with the willingness to accept reorientation. Employed persons were 4.5 times more likely to accept reorientation (OR = 4.5 CI (1.6-12.9)). Inversely, persons who perceived a high level of urgency were the least likely to accept reorientation (OR = 0.9 CI (0.8-0.9).

CONCLUSIONS

Our study provides information on the willingness of ED patients to accept reorientation and shows the limits of its feasibility. Alternative structures such as PCUs near the ED seem to respond appropriately to the growing demands of nonurgent patients. Reorientation, however, will be successful only if the new structures adapt their opening hours to the needs of nonurgent patients and if their physicians can perform specific technical skills.

[Medical emergency care units in France]

The objective of this article is to take inventory of the different medical emergency care units in France as of June 30, 2003, and to describe their main characteristics.

METHODOLOGY

A telephone survey was conducted which posed questions based on a standard questionnaire to the Regional Unions of Liberal Doctors, the County Advisory Boards of the Medical Orders, and the directors and managers of the existing emergency care units.

RESULTS

97 medical safe houses were inventoried, 46 of which were operational and 51 which were in development. The Ile-de-France region is the region with the highest concentration of these units either operating or under construction. A large majority of the emergency care units were created since the year 2000, and half of them are located within health care centres and the other half into separate cells either close or distant from existing health care centres. More than half of them have no other staff aside from doctors, whilst the others comprise a spectrum of personnel including secretaries, nurses, and social assistants amongst others. More than half of the doctors are paid at the cost of each consultation and per treatment and do not have a technical platform at their disposal. Usually, these emergency care units are open all night during the week and on the weekends. One-third of them collaborate with the emergency centre and ambulance service (those who respond to calls to 15) and three-quarters of them are funded by the city's Assistance Fund for the Quality of Care.

CONCLUSION

It would seem advantageous that a Charter for operation and management of these establishments be drafted and implemented in order standardise these types of structures and that their supervisors implement a national and regional follow-up mechanism for the establishments in order to better evaluate the evolution in terms of health care organisation, in particular with respect to raising the level and capacity of response.

[Attitude and behavior of health services users in the face of real or perceived emergencies]

OBJECTIVES

To perform an opinion poll of users of normal health care, excluding emergency care, and also to identify populations which have required emergency care and to clarify the parameters which influence user decisions.

METHODS

A transversal descriptive survey of users of Primary Medical Assurance Centres (Caisse Primaire d'Assurance Maladie) in the catchment area of the Hôpital Nord in Marseilles, France, on a given day (7 days in total). Data were gathered using a standardised questionnaire based on the following topics: socio-demographic profile of interviewed participants, patient attitude toward general practitioners' care, the reaction to a situation felt to be urgent and for which they resorted to emergency services.

RESULTS

Interpretation of the results from 253 completed questionnaires demonstrated that users are mainly young, underprivileged, females, but who are not excluded from the health care system (good social security cover and marked presence of a family doctor). User behaviour differs according to the moment at which the problem arises (working hours, outside working hours) and depending on the degree of urgency perceived. ARISE OF DEMAND: In the most of cases, the patient consults emergency services for himself/herself. He/She takes the decision without prior consultation with a physician, within one hour of the problem arising, whether the problem is perceived as urgent or life-threatening, and arrived there under his/her own means. The main reason given is the access to emergency services without appointment and the principal medical reasons were for injuries and pain.

CONCLUSION

This study demonstrates that users have a coherent approach depending on physician's consulting hours and according to user's perception of the emergency. On the other hand it is clear that users lack information concerning available after-hours care and the physicians night-duty organisation.

Spinocerebellar ataxia type 8: clinical features in a large family

OBJECTIVE

To compare the clinical and genetic features of the seven-generation family (MN-A) used to define the spinocerebellar ataxia 8 (SCA8) locus.

BACKGROUND

The authors recently described an untranslated CTG expansion that causes a novel form of SCA (SCA8) characterized by reduced penetrance and complex patterns of repeat instability.

METHODS

Clinical and molecular features of 82 members of the MN-A family were evaluated by neurologic examination, quantitative dexterity testing, and, in some individuals, MRI and sperm analyses.

RESULTS

SCA8 is a slowly progressive, predominantly cerebellar ataxia with marked cerebellar atrophy, affecting gait, swallowing, speech, and limb and eye movements. CTG tracts are longer in affected (mean = 116 CTG repeats) than in unaffected expansion carriers (mean = 90, p < 10-8). Quantitative dexterity testing did not detect even subtle signs of ataxia in unaffected expansion carriers. Surprisingly, all 21 affected MN-A family members inherited an expansion from their mothers. The maternal penetrance bias is consistent with maternal repeat expansions yielding alleles above the pathogenic threshold in the family (>107 CTG) and paternal contractions resulting in shorter alleles. Consistent with the reduced penetrance of paternal transmissions, CTG tracts in all or nearly all sperm (84 to 99) are significantly shorter than in the blood (116) of an affected man.

CONCLUSIONS

The biologic relationship between repeat length and ataxia indicates that the CTG repeat is directly involved in SCA8 pathogenesis. Diagnostic testing and genetic counseling are complicated by the reduced penetrance, which often makes the inheritance appear recessive or sporadic, and by interfamilial differences in the length of a stable (CTA)n tract preceding the CTG repeat.