Kudos to Chip Bailey and Shawn McClintock for their NIH R21 resubmission entitled “Preparing Carepartner Adaptive Strategies for Health (PREPARE)." This proposal requests funding for a two-year period with a start date of December 1,  2017.

Abstract: Carepartners of patients treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) face distressing and disruptive affective symptom sequelae during and following the course of their patients’ usual five weeks of ECT treatment. During this time, Carepartners help patients manage cognitive changes, personal care, and assume new instrumental activities of daily living. Assisting patients presents adaptive challenges, defined as situations that an individual is unable to address with their existing capabilities or familiar methods, habits or values. Adaptive challenges require the Carepartner and patient to learn new self-management skills and change behavior.  Such challenges may result in the Carepartners experiencing affective symptoms (e.g., anxiety, depression), reduced quality-of-life, and burden. Unfortunately, no interventions exist for these Carepartners; such interventions are urgently needed to foster symptom self-management with the aim of promoting Carepartner health by improving affective symptoms, enhancing quality of life, and decreasing burden. No research has examined the symptom sequelae of Carepartners of patients treated with ECT; in fact, only two US descriptive studies have examined ECT-related Carepartner burden. The goal of this study is to describe trajectories of Carepartner symptom sequelae, adaptive challenges, and to determine with Carepartners and patients the strategies they use to address their symptoms and adaptive challenges. To document symptoms and challenges of Carepartners that correspond to patient symptoms and changes in functional status, we build upon our prior NIH supported work in which we developed affective and cognitive measures (K23 MH087739, RC1 NS68983; P30 NR014139) and described adaptive challenges and strategies for Carepartners of patients with chronic illnesses (R21 NR013461). This R21 project has two aims: 1) to describe the trajectory of symptoms and adaptive challenges that Carepartners report in response to changes in cognition and instrumental activities of daily living of patients during 5 weeks of treatment with ECT and follow-up at 2 weeks; and 2) to determine the Carepartners’ and patients’ perspectives about strategies they use to self-manage their symptoms and adaptive challenges. Positioned at the intersection of symptom and self-management sciences, such knowledge will be used to inform the next generation of self-management interventions targeting Carepartner symptom self-management and adaptive challenges to address the skills, learning, and behaviors that Carepartners need to achieve optimal health outcomes.