Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Oct 31, 2023
Date Accepted: Feb 22, 2024
A Clinician Vetted Dementia Caregiver Resources Website: Development and Evaluation Process
ABSTRACT
Background:
Eleven million Americans are caregivers for the 6.7 million Americans currently living with dementia. They provide over 18 billion hours of unpaid care per year and yet most have no formal dementia education or support. It is extremely difficult for clinicians to keep up with the demand for caregiver education, especially as dementia is neurodegenerative in nature, requiring different information at different stages of the disease process. In this digital age, caregivers often seek dementia information on the internet but many online digital resources are not peer-reviewed.
Objective:
To create a Dementia Caregiver Resources website to serve as a hub for user-friendly, high-quality, and peer-reviewed dementia educational resources that can easily supplied to family caregivers of people with dementia.
Methods:
The interdisciplinary website development team (representing occupational therapy, nursing, social work, geriatrics, and neurology) went through six iterative steps of website development to ensure resource selection quality and eligibility rigor. Steps included 1: Resource Collection; 2: Creation of Eligibility Criteria; 3: Resource Organization by Topic; 4: Additional Content Identification; 5: Finalize Resource Selection; 6: Website Testing and Launch. Website traffic was tracked and a 20-item clinician survey was sent to evaluate website usability and utility after launch.
Results:
Following the six-stage website development, the Dementia Caregiver Resource Website was launched in February 2022. Over the first nine months, the site averaged 1100 visits per month. The three subcategories with the highest number of visits were General Dementia Information, Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), and Self-Care and Support. Most (98%) survey participants (N=60) agreed or strongly agreed that the website was easy to navigate and all (100%) respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the resources were useful.
Conclusions:
The Dementia Caregiver Resource Website received thousands of visits and positive clinician reviews in its first nine months. Results demonstrate that a clinician-vetted nationally and virtually available resource website allows for easy access to dementia education for clinicians to provide their patients and caregivers.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.