Nursing-Based Educational and Digital-Assisted Support for Severe Ischemic Stroke Patients' Caregivers

Research Objectives: The aim of the project is to develop and test an inclusive working model for ischemic stroke patients' informal caregivers to reduce the burden on relatives, improve their quality of life, and use healthcare resources efficiently. Hypotheses suggest that the use of digital educational content to support and inform family members can reduce caregivers' care burden, improve emotional well-being, reduce the number of preventable complications, and reduce re-hospitalizations.

Design: The study group consisted of 18 family members of ischemic stroke patients, with the intervention group receiving nurse counseling supported by a mobile application for up to 180 days following stroke, while the control group received standard treatment processes. The digital tool provided personalized treatment plans based on evidence-based guidelines. The platform also provided a digital audit trail of all end-user actions and a dashboard for population metrics.

Setting: Home setting.

Participants: 18 family members of ischemic stroke patients.

Interventions: The intervention was a mobile app.

Main Outcome Measures: The main outcome measures were answers to questionnaires, filled in by the family members, and interviews with family members. The questionnaires and interviews investigated the digital tool's effect on family members' wellbeing, and confidence.

Results: Results showed that the digital tool to empower family members/informal caregivers reduced caregivers' care burden and improved their emotional well-being.

Conclusions: This study provides a promising solution to improve the quality of care for stroke patients and their informal caregivers, addressing critical deficiency areas in terms of non-availability of required nursing and rehabilitation specialist resources. Future works include adding standardized cognitive control, burnout, and stress monitoring instruments to the intervention to have a broader socioeconomic effect on informal caregivers and correlate the support function with clinical outcomes.

Author(s) Disclosures: It should be noted that two of the authors of this study are affiliated with the company that developed the solution. However, it’s important to highlight that they did not receive any revenue for their involvement in this research, which was conducted independently.