This application proposes a three-year project between a US and Indian team to develop and test an educational intervention aimed at ameliorating the stress and burden experienced by persons caring at home for demented relatives. The project extends the work of a parent grant which is testing the effectiveness of two training programs in addressing issues of stress and burden among dementia family caregivers. The proposed project is in three parts. In the first part, qualitative methods will be used to identify and clarify the meaning of and concerns about dementia care giving among urban and rural Indian family caregivers in Bangalore, India. Results of this phase will be used to develop a prototype educational intervention- conceptually based in the US team model. The prototype intervention will be iteratively tried and formatively evaluated under a number of conditions (e.g., as a group versus individual program; in a community setting or in homes; taught by experts versus Multi Purpose Health Workers). Based on the findings of the formative evaluation in the second phase, a final version of the program will be developed for the third phase. This version will include all the materials needed to conduct the program and a program of faculty development to be provided, as needed, for those who will deliver the program. In the third phase, the program will be tested in a small randomized trial of the program, possibly in Cochin, India, as well as Bangalore. As the methods section indicates, the project will include involvement by the US partners in every stage of development and testing largely through electronic dialogue. The project will benefit from the foreign investigator's collaboration with the 10/66 Research Group's on-going work in India on issues related to dementia and dementia care giving.
| Narayan, Suzanne M; Varghese, Mathew; Hepburn, Kenneth et al. (2015) Caregiving experiences of family members of persons with dementia in south India. Am J Alzheimers Dis Other Demen 30:508-16 |
