Training Helps Stroke Caregivers Cope

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A study conducted in the UK shows that hands-on training can ease the burden of caring for a loved one who has suffered a stroke.

In the study, caregivers who were formally taught how to provide care at home tended to have less anxiety and a better quality of life than those who received no formal training in caregiving.

"Caregiving is a major transition in people's lives, associated with lots of anxiety and stress, but making people confident about their own abilities really does help," study investigator Dr. Lalit Kalra said in a statement.

"We need to change our focus in rehabilitation and start looking at patients and their caregivers as a unit," added Kalra who is a professor of stroke medicine at Guy's, King's and St. Thomas' School of Medicine in London.

It's estimated that up to 80 percent of stroke survivors "graduate" from rehabilitation centers and return home, according to the team's report ion the American Heart Associations journal Stroke.

However, about 25 to 74 percent of these individuals require assistance, usually from family members, to complete basic activities of daily living such as eating, dressing and getting in and out of bed. This can be extremely stressful for caregivers.

To see if formal training helps ease the caregivers' burden, UK clinicians followed 232 stroke survivors who left rehab with moderate disabilities.

Half of the caregivers were given only customary support from the rehab center such as information on stroke and its consequences and advice on services available after discharge.

The other half received formal hands-on training at the rehabilitation unit on a variety of issues they might face at home, such as how to prevent and treat bed sores and other common stroke-related problems, how to communicate with stroke patients and how to safely help them get in and out of bed.

The investigators found that those in the caregiver training group tended to have less stress and anxiety and a better quality of life at both three months and one year after the loved one was discharged from the hospital.

"The most important conclusion of our study," Kalra told Reuters Health, "was that caregivers of disabled stroke patients returning home suffer significant anxiety, caregiver burden and loss of quality of life in the aftermath of stroke which is reduced by formal training in caregiving skills. Hence, not only patients, but also caregivers, need to be seen as active recipients of therapy interventions during rehabilitation."

SOURCE: Stroke, September 2005.