A Problem Solving Intervention for Hospice Caregivers

Hospice care is conceptualized as quality compassionate care for people facing a life-limiting illness, with services that cover clinical care, pain management, and emotional and spiritual support tailored to patients' and families' needs and preferences. Family members, spouses, friends or others who assume the unpaid or informal caregiving role are essential to the delivery of hospice services; however, stress and caregiver burden can negatively affect caregivers' morbidity and mortality. The emotional needs of individuals caring for dying persons at home are not well attended, and interventions aiming to provide support to hospice caregivers are notably lacking. The investigator team recently completed a study with 514 hospice caregivers to test a problem-solving therapy (PST) intervention tailored specifically for the hospice setting, entitled PISCES (Problem-solving Intervention to Support Caregivers in End of Life care Settings). The findings demonstrate that the PISCES intervention when delivered face to face was effective leading to statistically significant decrease in anxiety and increase in quality of life when compared to the other groups (video group and attention control). An additional lesson learned from that RCT study was that caregivers wanted to focus not only on specific problems or challenges, but also on recognizing the positive aspects of caregiving. This approach of positive reappraisal has been found to enhance problem solving interventions in other settings. The specific aims of this new study are: 1) to compare the effectiveness of the PISCES intervention when delivered face to face and when delivered in a hybrid platform (with the first session in person and remaining sessions via video) to hospice caregivers; 2) to compare the effectiveness of the PISCES intervention to the refined PISCES intervention (PISCESplus) that integrates positive reappraisal elements; 3) to assess caregivers' perceptions of and satisfaction with the PISCESplus intervention; and 4) to conduct a cost analysis of the three intervention groups.