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Table 3 Contents of the booklet: Live with Love - Hope for the best, prepare for the worst

From: The development of a complex intervention in China: the ‘Caring for Couples Coping with Cancer “4Cs” Programme’ to support couples coping with cancer

Title

Contents

Primary stressorsa

✓ Helping with medications

 ❖ Taking care of your spouse with cancer

✓ Providing hygiene car

✓ Assisting with eating and drinking

✓ Help with other ‘technical’ care

✓ Use of special equipment

✓ Dealing with common symptoms

 - Pain (including concern about opioids and hastening death); Nausea; Constipation; Breathlessness; Fatigue; Delirium

✓ Emotional care

✓ Spiritual care at the end of life

✓ How much should patients be told about their illness?

✓ Available cancer care resources

Secondary stressorsb

✓ The Role of the Caregiver

 ❖ Being a caregiver—what is it about?

✓ Helping to Manage Your Loved One’s Treatment

✓ Helping Your Loved One With Practical Matters

✓ Providing Emotional Support

✓ Caregiving Under Difficult Circumstances

✓ Taking Care of Yourself

 - Staying Healthy

 - Getting Emotional Support

 - Getting Help With Caregiving Responsibilities

 - Maintaining hope when the situation seems hopeless

 - Feeling overwhelmed? It’s time to relax!

 - Taking a break

Dyadic mediatorc

✓ Sense of self-efficacy

 ❖ Caring for your relationships

✓ Reciprocal self-disclosure

✓ Partner responsiveness

✓ Relationship engagement

✓ Family meetings

✓ Your relationship with the person you are caring for

✓ Involving children

✓ Your relationship with family and friends

Dyadic appraisald

✓ The meaning of their role in daily life

 ❖ Sharing the stressful event

✓ Caregivers’ feeling of accomplishment;

✓ The illness representations

✓ Illness ownership

✓ Specific stressors

✓ Communication

✓ Reciprocal influence

✓ Caregiver-patient congruence

Dyadic copinge

✓ Problem-, emotion and meaning-focused coping

 ❖ Improving supportive and collaborative coping

 - Benefit finding

 - Benefit reminding

 - Adaptive goal processes,

 - Reordering priorities

 - Infusing ordinary events with positive meaning

✓ Cognitive-behavioural responses

 - Planning ahead

 - Self-care

 - Caregiving behaviours

  1. aPrimary stressors: refer to factors related to the patient’s illness, such as the stage of the cancer, the patient’s physical health, care demands (dependency), and the cancer trajectory
  2. bSecondary stressors: consist of role conflict, the caregiver-patient relationship, schedule disruptions, loss of sleep, fatigue, and contextual factors
  3. cDyadic mediator: act as “leverage” to balance or off-set the stressors leading to the dyadic appraisal, coping, and adjustment of the cancer couple dyads. It includes the following components: “daily enrichment events”, “caregiver’s sense of self-efficacy”, relationship-enhancing strategies, e.g. reciprocal self-disclosure, partner responsiveness, and relationship engagement
  4. dDyadic appraisal: refers to the components and representation of the illness, illness ownership, and whether the couple shared the stressors
  5. eDyadic coping: is conceptualized as a continuum of couple involvement ranging from the non-involvement of the spouse, that the patient perceives that he or she is alone in coping with the stressful event, to the over-involvement of the spouse, that the patient perceives the spouse as controlling, in that the spouse dominates the actions of the ill partner by taking charge and telling the partner what to do
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BMC Palliative Care

ISSN: 1472-684X

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