Family Caregiver Skills Training to Improve Experiences of Care: a Randomized Clinical Trial.

Van Houtven CH, Smith VA, Lindquist JH, Chapman JG, Hendrix C, Hastings SN, Oddone EZ, King HA, Shepherd-Banigan M, Weinberger M. Family Caregiver Skills Training to Improve Experiences of Care: a Randomized Clinical Trial. Journal of general internal medicine. 2019 Oct 1; 34(10):2114-2122.

Related HSR&D Project(s)

• CDA 17-006 – Increasing mental health services use through enabling resources & family support

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Abstract:

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effectiveness of Helping Invested Families Improve Veterans'' Experiences Study (HI-FIVES), a skills training program for caregivers of persons with functional or cognitive impairments. DESIGN: A two-arm RCT. SETTING: Single Veterans Affairs Medical Center. PARTICIPANTS: Patients and their primary caregivers referred in the past 6 months to home and community-based services or geriatrics clinic. INTERVENTION: All caregivers received usual care. Caregivers in HI-FIVES also received five training calls and four group training sessions. MAIN MEASURES: Cumulative patient days at home 12 months post-randomization, defined as days not in an emergency department, inpatient hospital, or post-acute facility. Secondary outcomes included patients'' total VA health care costs, caregiver and patient rating of the patient''s experience of VA health care, and caregiver depressive symptoms. RESULTS: Of 241 dyads, caregivers'' (patients'') mean age was 61 (73) years, 54% (53%) Black and 89% (4%) female. HI-FIVES was associated with a not statistically significant 9% increase in the rate of days at home (95% CI 0.72, 1.65; mean difference 1 day over 12 months). No significant differences were observed in health care costs or caregiver depressive symptoms. Model-estimated mean baseline patient experience of VA care (scale of 0-10) was 8.43 (95% CI 8.16, 8.70); the modeled mean difference between HI-FIVES and controls at 3 months was 0.29 (p? = .27), 0.31 (p? = 0.26) at 6 months, and 0.48 (p? = 0.03) at 12 months. For caregivers, it was 8.34 (95% CI 8.10, 8.57); the modeled mean difference at 3 months was 0.28 (p? = .18), 0.53 (p? < .01) at 6 months, and 0.46 (p? = 0.054) at 12 months. CONCLUSIONS: HI-FIVES did not increase patients'' days at home; it showed sustained improvements in caregivers'' and patients'' experience of VA care at clinically significant levels, nearly 0.5 points. The training holds promise in increasing an important metric of care quality-reported experience with care.