Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland
Browse
The role of carer stress in acute and long-term care utilisation.pdf (8.09 MB)

The role of carer stress in acute and long-term care utilisation by community-dwelling older people

Download (8.09 MB)
thesis
posted on 2019-11-22, 18:05 authored by Nora-Ann Donnelly

Background: In examining the sustainability of homecare, gerontological researchers have increasingly recognised how stressful caregiving can be. Indeed, several researchers have postulated that carer stress could increase the risk of institutional care utilisation by care recipients. However, this contention has not been critically analysed. Therefore, this thesis asks to what extent, if any, carer stress influences institutional care utilisation by community-dwelling older people.

Methods: A mixed methods approach was adopted. Study 1 systematically reviewed and meta-analysed the strength of the effect of carer stress on subsequent institutionalisation of community-dwelling older people. Study 2 qualitatively analysed healthcare professionals’ (n=22) and carers’ (n=16) perceptions of how carer stress and health system factors may influence long-term care (LTC) admissions. Study 3 compared different theoretically-informed models to determine factors that may influence institutional care utilisation by community-dwelling older people (n=205). This was a secondary analysis of The Irish Longitudinal Study of Ageing (TILDA).

Results: Study 1 found that while carer stress has a significant effect on subsequent institutionalisation of care recipients, the overall effect size was negligible (N= 54 studies; standardised mean difference =0.05, 95% CI=0.04-0.07). Study 2 found the escalation of care recipients’ needs, to the extent that the carer or community care cannot meet these needs, drove both carer stress and LTC admissions. This suggests that carer stress is an epiphenomenon of the journey to LTC. This was represented in a proposed alternative theoretical model. This model was examined in Study 3, which found the effects of institutional care utilisation on carer stress were as convincing as the effect of carer stress on institutional care utilisation.

Conclusions: Carer stress is not a risk factor for care recipient institutionalisation. It appears to co-occur with the need for institutional care utilisation rather than driving this utilisation. The thesis proposed and tested an alternative theoretical model to represent this, which has considerable implications for the caregiving literature. Future research should further test this model in prospective structural analysis with other sufficiently-powered samples.

History

First Supervisor

Dr Frank Doyle

Second Supervisor

Professor Anne Hickey

Third Supervisor

Dr Niamh Humphries

Fourth Supervisor

Dr Christine McGarrigle

Comments

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 2017.

Published Citation

Donnelly NA. The role of carer stress in acute and long-term care utilisation by community-dwelling older people [PhD Thesis]. Dublin: Royal College of Surgeons In Ireland; 2017.

Degree Name

  • Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Date of award

2017-11-30

Usage metrics

    Theses and Dissertations

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC