The efficacy of a hospice shared-care model on the care overload of primary caregivers of terminal-stage cancer patients

Background: The symptoms of patients tend to multiply and become more complex during the advanced stages of cancer. Care overload often occurs when family caregivers are concurrently affected by grief or bereavement. Purpose: To explore care overload, severity, and the severity of changes for family caregivers who participate in hospice shared-care programs. Methods: This was a single-group, prospective, quasi-experimental study. Participants included the family caregivers that participated in hospice shared care with terminal cancer patients in northern Taiwan. Convenience sampling was used with a total of 52 participants. The research instrument was a family-caregiver overload in hospice-shared care recording sheet. A generalized estimating equation was used to analyze the change in severity level of family-care overload. Results: According to the data on hospice-shared care involvement, the overload severity of family caregivers improved significantly and continuously between the recent intervention 48hrs and the following 12 days (p <.05). Conclusions: The hospice shared-care model assists oncology care teams to improve care overload for family-caregivers.