Self-reported medical morbidity among informal caregivers of chronic illness: the case of cancer
Self-reported medical morbidity among informal caregivers of chronic illness: the case of cancer
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DOI：
10.1007/s11136-012-0255-y
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发表时间：
2013-08-01
影响因子：
3.5
通讯作者：
Shaffer, Kelly M.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Kim, Youngmee;Carver, Charles S.;Shaffer, Kelly M.
癌症等慢性病患者的家人和朋友提供的非正式护理对医疗系统和社会作出了宝贵贡献，但也带来了挑战，导致护理人员的发病率和死亡率增加。研究这一主题的研究人员面临的主要困难，从医疗记录中获取有关照顾者的发病率的信息，这是一个昂贵和耗时的程序，作为替代方案，我们开发了一个简短的自我管理措施的病态条件的非正式照顾者的人与医疗疾病。我们使用大量癌症护理人员样本（N = 774）测试了名为慢性病护理人员发病率指数（MICCI）的测量方法。MICCI的有效性得到了以下证据的支持，即大多数发病率的自我报告与这些发病率的众所周知的人口统计学相关性有关，例如年龄较大和男性，总体得分与MOS SF测量的医疗人群健康状况的广泛使用的指标相关。护理人员报告平均有4.5种病态。较高数量的发病率预测照顾者的较差的身体和心理健康评分的MOS.MICCI的优点是提供了一个整体的发病率指数和特定的诊断类别的信息，是潜在的兴趣，研究人员。
Informal care provided by family and friends of patients with chronic illness, such as cancer, makes an invaluable contribution to the medical system and to society, yet it also imposes challenges that result in increased morbidity and mortality of the caregivers. Researchers studying this topic confront major difficulties in acquiring information about caregivers' morbidity from medical records, a procedure that is costly and time consuming.As an alternative, we developed a brief self-administered measure of morbid conditions for informal caregivers of persons with medical illness. We tested the measure, named the Morbidities Index for Caregivers of Chronic Illnesses (MICCI), using a large cancer caregiver sample (N = 774).The validity of the MICCI was supported by evidence that self-reports of the majority of morbidities were related to well-known demographic correlates of such morbidities, such as older age and being male, and that overall scores are related to widely used indicators of health status of medical populations as measured by the MOS SF. Caregivers reported an average of 4.5 morbid conditions. A higher number of morbidities were predicted by caregivers' poorer physical and mental health scores on the MOS.MICCI has the advantage of providing both an overall index of morbidities and information about specific diagnostic categories that are of potential interest to researchers.