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Family caregiver challenges in dementia care in Australia and China: a critical perspective
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Background: Both Australia and China have a large proportion of people with dementia and the prevalence will
triple in Australia and increase five times in China by 2050. The majority of people with dementia are reliant on
family caregivers to provide daily care and to maintain the dignity in both countries. As a consequence, caregiver
burden has become a major concern because of the negative impact on the care recipients’ and the caregivers’
health. It is strongly recommended that cross-national collaboration should be conducted to share experiences
in fighting dementia. The aim of this study was to compare socially and culturally constructed enablers and
barriers pertinent to dementia caregivers in one capital city in Australia and one capital city in China through critical
reflection on the caregivers’ subjective and objective experiences for the improvement of dementia care services in
both countries.
Methods: Giddens’ Structuration Theory was used as a framework to guide a concurrent mixed methods design
with the qualitative strand as a priority. In the qualitative strand, data were collected by focus groups and in-depth
interviews while in the quantitative strand, data were collected by questionnaire survey.
Results: In total 148 caregivers participated in the project with 57 of them from Australia (26 and 31 in the
qualitative and quantitative strands respectively) and 91 of them from China (23 and 68 in the qualitative and
quantitative strands respectively). Findings from the qualitative and quantitative strands were presented as three
categories: A higher objective burden in the Chinese cohort versus a higher subjective burden in the Australian
cohort; Unmet need for caregiver support in Australia and China; and Expectations for improving dementia services
in Australia and for developing dementia services in China.
Conclusions: Dementia policy, services and resources need to be grounded on current research evidence in an
ever-changing society like China. In Australia, dementia services need to have more components of preventing or
reducing caregivers’ subjective burden. As subjective burden is mediate