Care for the Carers: A Self-management program for carers of people with vision impairment

Care for the Carers is a self-management program for carers of people with a vision impairment. The Care for the Carers manual includes all the materials necessary for a health professional to initiate and facilitate a six-session course for carers of people with a vision impairment. Step-by-step instructions for establishing the course and recruiting participants are also provided. The program is underpinned by the principles of self-management. The Care for the Carers program grew out of a series of workshops for carers developed for ABWA by Susan Douglas and Lisa Viska. The Care for the Carers self-management program builds upon these workshops and embeds the principles of self-management in a structured program tailored for carers of people with vision loss. This protocol aims to provide people in a care giving role with the opportunity to gain more knowledge about their partner’s or family member’s vision loss, with practical strategies to assist their partner or family member to manage their vision loss and also with skills and strategies to enhance their self-care. The Care for the Carers program comprised one component of the Vision Self-management in Practice Project, a collaborative project between the Centre for Research into Disability and Society of Curtin University and the Association for the Blind of Western Australia. The project aimed to develop and evaluate new self-management interventions, to provide health professionals with the knowledge and skills to facilitate self-management programs, and to develop organisational capacity to electronically record and monitor participant outcomes over time. The Care for the Carers component specifically aimed to empower people in a caring role, by providing them with information, strategies and skills, so as to increase their confidence in managing their caring role

Protocol for the ProCare Trial: a phase II randomised controlled trial of shared care for follow-up of men with prostate cancer

Introduction Men with prostate cancer require long-term follow-up to monitor disease progression and manage common adverse physical and psychosocial consequences of treatment. There is growing recognition of the potential role of primary care in cancer follow-up. This paper describes the protocol for a phase II multisite randomised controlled trial of a novel model of shared care for the follow-up of men after completing treatment for low-moderate risk prostate cancer. Methods and analysis The intervention is a shared care model of follow-up visits in the first 12 months after completing treatment for prostate cancer with the following specific components: a survivorship care plan, general practitioner (GP) management guidelines, register and recall systems, screening for distress and unmet needs and patient information resources. Eligible men will have completed surgery and/or radiotherapy for low-moderate risk prostate cancer within the previous 8 weeks and have a GP who consents to participate. Ninety men will be randomised to the intervention or current hospital follow-up care. Study outcome measures will be collected at baseline, 3, 6 and 12 months and include anxiety, depression, unmet needs, prostate cancer-specific quality of life and satisfaction with care. Clinical processes and healthcare resource usage will also be measured. The principal emphasis of the analysis will be on obtaining estimates of the treatment effect size and assessing feasibility in order to inform the design of a subsequent phase III trial. Ethics and dissemination Ethics approval has been granted by the University of Western Australia and from all hospital recruitment sites in Western Australia and Victoria. Results of this phase II trial will be reported in peer-reviewed publications and in conference presentations