Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Cancer
Date Submitted: Jun 26, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 29, 2018 - Jul 13, 2018
Date Accepted: Dec 29, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Improvements on a Mobilized Stress Management Program (Pep-Pal) for Caregivers of Oncology Patients
ABSTRACT
Background:
Caregivers of patients with advanced diseases are a highly-distressed population. Recent research has focused on recognizing caregivers in need of psychosocial support to help them manage their distress. Evidenced-based technological interventions have the potential to aid caregivers in managing distress.
Objective:
To describe caregiver perceptions of the usability, acceptability, and future adaptations of a mobilized psychoeducation and skills-based intervention.
Methods:
This study is a part of a larger trial of a mobilized psychoeducation and skills-based intervention (Pep-Pal) for caregivers of patients with advanced illness. The current substudy utilized mixed methods analysis from quantitative data from all 26 intervention participants and qualitative data from 14 intervention caregivers who completed the Pep-Pal intervention. The qualitative semi-structured individual interviews, which were conducted within the first four weeks of completing the intervention, assessed the helpfulness and utility of Pep-Pal. Applied thematic analysis was conducted via independent review of transcripts to extract salient themes.
Results:
Overall, Pep-Pal was deemed acceptable for caregivers of patients with advanced cancer in all web-based sessions except for Improving Intimacy. Caregivers perceived the program to be of use across the areas they needed and in others that they had not anticipated. Caregiver recommendations of key changes for the program were: to include more variety in caregiver actors in sessions, change the title of Improving Intimacy to Improving Relationships, provide an audio only option in addition to video, and to change the format of the mobilized website program to a stand-alone mobile application.
Conclusions:
The valuable feedback in key areas from individual interviews will be integrated into the final version of Pep-Pal that will be tested in a fully powered randomized clinical trial. Clinical Trial: Clinicaltrials.gov NCT03002896; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03002896
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.