Family caregivers' priorities for home care: a need assessment study

Many studies have demonstrated that patients prioritize some attributes of health care over others. However, little effort has been devoted to measure which service attributes are most important to consumers, regardless of their satisfaction, in the field of home care. Moreover, home care requires family members to participate as caregivers. Thus, evaluating the needs of family caregivers who also provide home care should provide an opportunity to envision an effective home care system.

This study was designed to measure family caregivers' need for auxiliary home care services by examining their priorities for attributes of home care services. The respondents were asked to select 5 attributes, which were most important for them, from 19 choices of home care services, and then to rank 5 attributes in decreasing order of importance to determine their priorities, coded from 1 (the first priority) to 5 (the last important priority). The degree of satisfaction from a single attribute, whether or not the desired attribute was in fact provided, personal data of family caregivers, and types of patient's insurance were also included in this study.

The interviewees were inclined to assign high priority to the ease of contacting home care nurses by telephone (73.6%) and the timeliness of obtaining needed services in an emergency (63.6%); they were less likely to attach high priority to provision of spiritual support (6.3%), respect given by home care nurses (5.4%), and acceptance of suggestions (4.5%). Whether a single attribute was selected as a top five priority was significantly associated with family caregiver's education level, degree of satisfaction with the attribute and whether the desired attribute was actually received.

The interviewees had different priorities for attributes of home care, and they assigned high importance to the attributes less satisfied and received; examples are the timeliness of obtaining needed services in an emergency, and the ease of contacting home care nurses by telephone.