Building Resilience in Caregivers of Trauma Survivors

About the Research

For some people who experience significant trauma, the injuries sustained may limit independent living and, in some cases, the return home can involve needing assistance from a loved one, taking on the role of caregiving for tasks that can’t be completed independently. For some families, this is a short-term situation. For others, the caregiving role may extended for decades. While most caregivers would not want to hand off the caregiving role, research into caregiver’s health and quality of life also demonstrates that they can also have a negative impact on functions ranging from psychological (such as depression and anxiety) to the physical (sleep, illness). These findings alone should motivate research into potential treatments that can mediate these effects in caregivers.

Ideally, caregivers would have access to any and all support resources needed. However, there are significant challenges for caregivers to find time to attend therapy or group support sessions, find support to cover this time away, and, in many cases, distance. It is because of these considerations that we have adapted a novel support tool: an adapted diary that is commonly used in intensive care settings where caregivers are encouraged to identify challenges they’re facing and identify proactive methods to address them. This tool leverages the success of one type of therapy, problem solving therapy, and integrates it into a tool that family members find useful in caring for complex health concerns. The effects of using the diary will be compared to standard support (including support groups) and a short term in-person problem solving therapy experience. If such a diary can provide any significant assistance, it can be deployed with little cost and the caregiver can use this tool at any time without need for a clinician to provide therapy. The proposed research goal is to test whether this type of diary is beneficial to reducing depression, anxiety, and substance use in caregivers.

We believe that early intervention, like most other preventative medicine approaches, can help reinforce resilience reducing the long term cost of caregiving. As a first step that allows us appropriate control, we are proposing to assess these two interventions, compared to a control group, in a three site randomized Level I trauma sample where a patient has been admitted to the ICU as a result of trauma with a severe to critical injury including massive physical trauma and gunshot wounds likely requiring long periods of rehabilitation. This allows us to examine how to better support the “unexpected caregiver.”

Participation of the Potential Caregiver

The research can be broken down into five main parts: the informed consent process, baseline interview and questionnaires, intervention (control, diary, and traditional problem solving therapy), a three month follow up and a six month follow up. Estimates of time required for each as well as the process are detailed below.

 

 

 

 

Contact Information

The lead investigator for this research is Deborah Little, PhD. She can be contacted via email at [email protected].