Home Caregiver-older Adults RelationshipNCT03726034
Life Story Book for Older Adults and live-in Migrant Caregivers
A study testing Life Story Book and Self-selected social activities in people with Home Caregiver-older Adults Relationship, run by Tung Wah College.
Trial summary
The relationship between older adults and live-in migrant caregivers is always challenged by weak emotional connectedness, ineffective communication, power struggling and unmet needs of both, that may lead to poor care quality and negatively influence their well-being. Read more about this study
- Who is it for?
- Any ageHealthy volunteers can take part
- Conditions the study is for
- Home Caregiver-older Adults Relationship
- What is being tested?
- Life Story Book and Self-selected social activities
- Type of treatment
- Lifestyle or therapy programme
- Could I receive a placebo?
- No, everyone receives an active treatment
- How many people
- 100 participants
- Where
- No sites listed yet
- Study dates
- Jun 2019to Dec 2020
- Phase
- Interventional
- Are there results?
- None posted in the registry
Key requirements
Who can take part, as listed by the sponsor. Only the study team can confirm whether you are eligible, so take this list to your doctor.
- Ages Any age
- All sexes
- Healthy volunteers accepted
- Child, Adult, Older adult
Who may be able to join
- aged 60 or above
- community dwelling
- being cared by participating migrant caregivers
- have been working for the older adutls for more than 6 months
- at least completed primary education
- be communicable in either English or Cantonese.
Who cannot join
- unwilling to create life story book with the migrant caregivers
- not verbally communicable
- diagnosed with serious psychiatric illnesses or terminal illnesses
- Migrant caregivers:
Trial locations and contacts
No sites are listed yet.
About this study
Official title: Life Story Work for Promoting Relationship Between Older Adults and live-in Migrant Caregivers: a Randomized Controlled Feasibility Trail
The relationship between older adults and live-in migrant caregivers is always challenged by weak emotional connectedness, ineffective communication, power struggling and unmet needs of both, that may lead to poor care quality and negatively influence their well-being. The aim of this study is to explore the feasibility to train live-in migrant caregivers to adopt Life Story Work for promoting the dyadic relationship with the older adults, through communication and negotiation, mutual understanding and expression of needs. This is a two-arm randomized controlled trial. The caregivers of the intervention group will receive training on life story work. Then they will be asked to create a life storybook of the older adult at home individually, with the support from the team. The caregivers in the control group will receive training on communication skills only, and will be asked to conduct social activities at home. Outcomes such as quality of relationship; well-being, depressive symptoms and level of loneliness of the older adults; and job satisfaction of the caregivers will be assessed at baseline, post-intervention and 3 months follow up. Focus group interviews will be conducted with the caregivers of the intervention group for soliciting their comments regarding to the intervention.
Read the detailed description
There are approximately 21.5 million live-in migrant workers, and around 41% of them are employed in Asia. Among the 352 thousand live-in migrant workers in Hong Kong, at least 21% of them are caregivers of older adults. The 2016 Policy Address suggested a pilot scheme for training live-in migrant caregivers to take care of the older people in Hong Kong to meet the trend of Ageing in Place, and cope with the dreadful shortage of formal long-term care services. As such, Social Welfare Department of Hong Kong is now implementing an 18-month pilot scheme to train live-in migrant workers to care for older adults in order to improve the well-being of the older adults. However, there is no effective evidence-based intervention available for such caregiving arrangement, not only locally but also internationally. The common training for live-in migrant workers is about instrumental training, such as feeding and bathing. According to the Relationship-Centred Care Model, relationship is the core for good quality of care. Life story work have been tested effective in various settings for promoting the psychological well-being of older adults with/out dementia, as well as proven useful in promoting mutual understanding and communication between caregivers and care-recipients.
The project is of value in that:
- It is a pioneer study, which aims to promote relationship between live-in migrant caregivers and older adults to support good quality of care.
- The life story work is a skill that is easily learnt and adopted for promoting and sustaining good relationship that may impact on the well-being of caregivers and care-recipients.
- Reduce the needs of formal long-term care services by retaining the older adults to be cared at home.
- The life story work has a potential to be adopted by all types of caregivers (including formal and informal caregivers; live-in and live-out) for promoting the caregiver-care recipient dyadic relationship through communication and negotiation between the dyads, mutual understanding and expression of needs.
Objectives:
- Explore the feasibility to train live-in migrant caregivers to adopt life story work;
- Explore the feasibility of trained live-in migrant caregivers to produce a life story book with the older adult at home; and
- Provide preliminary evidence of efficacy of the life story work on improving dyadic relationship, psychosocial outcomes of the older adults, and satisfaction of caregivers.
- Conditions
- Home Caregiver-older Adults Relationship
- Being tested
- Life Story Book, Self-selected social activities
- Keywords
- Caregiver relationship, Life story book, migrant caregivers, older adults, randomized controlled trial
What participants receive
What participants receive. In a randomised study each person is assigned to one group by chance.
Life Story BookBehavioural
The protocol of life story book creation is validated in Hong Kong. The life story book would contain two elements: (1) the development of the older adults over the course of his/her lifetime (i.e. from childhood to old age); and (2) the psychosocial development and ways of life of the older adults (e.g. education, marriage, career, and hobbies). The product of the intervention will be a written story with pictures or other memorabilia that are meaningful to the older adults. There is no limitation on the number of words, pages, and pictures. Four to six 60-minute scheduled sessions will be needed for the older adult and the live-in migrant caregivers to discuss and produce the lifestory book at home.
Self-selected social activitiesBehavioural
To control the possible social interaction effects on the dyadic relationship and wellbeing, the caregivers of the control group will conduct self-selected social activities with older adult at home individually for four times weekly.
| Study group | Role | What they receive |
|---|---|---|
| Life story book training | Experimental | The migrant caregivers will receive training (six weekly 1.5-hour sessions) about life story approach by a part-time trained interventionist with psychology or social work background with at least three years of working experience working with older people and have basic knowledge about the life story work. After training, the migrant caregivers will be asked to produce the life story book individually at home with the older adults Receives: Behavioral: Life Story Book |
| Communication skills training | Active comparator | The migrant caregivers who have randomly assigned into the control group will receive communication skills training (two 1.5-hour sessions) offered by another trained interventionist with psychology or social work background with at least three years of working experience working with older people. They would not receive any additional training on life story work. Receives: Behavioral: Self-selected social activities |
What is being measured
The primary outcome is the main question the study is designed to answer.
The change in quality of migrant caregiver-older adults relationship as assessed by 4-item Lawrence quality of the caregiver-care recipient relationship scale
General closeness, communication, similarity of views about life, and degree of getting along will be captured. Total score of the scale ranges from 4-16. Higher values represent a better quality of relationship. The cronhach's alpha for this scale was 0.85.
Measured: basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)
Secondary outcomes (4)
The change in loneliness of the older adults as assessed by the Chinese version of 6-item De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale
The scale consists of two sub-scales: emotional and social loneliness. Cronbach's alpha for this scale was 0.76. The overall loneliness score ranges from 0 to 6, where 0 means no loneliness and 6 indicates severe loneliness.
Measured: basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)
The change in depressive symptoms of the older adults as assessed by the Chinese version of 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale
The 15 items are scored on a dichotomous scale, from 0 to 1. Total score of the scale ranges from 0-15. Higher values represent the older adult has more depressive symptoms. A cutoff of greater or equals to 8 identifies clinically significant depression in older adults.
Measured: basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)
The change in well-being of the dyad as assessed by the 12-item General Health Questionnaire
Total score of he scale ranges from 0-36. Higher values represent the participant has worse health. The coefficient alpha for this scale was 0.87.
Measured: basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)
The change in satisfaction of caregiver as assessed by the 6-item Care Work Satisfaction Scale
The 6 items are rated on a ordinal scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
Measured: basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)
Timeline
From the start of the study to its completion; the mark is today. Estimated dates are the sponsor’s plan.
- First posted31 Oct 2018
- Study startJun 2019 (estimated)
- Primary completionAug 2020 (estimated)
- Study completionDec 2020 (estimated)
Resources
- Official record on ClinicalTrials.govThe registry entry this page is built from, with its full change history.
- Publications (1)Papers the sponsor has linked to this study.
- Other trials for Home Caregiver-older Adults RelationshipStudies of the same condition, open and under way.
- What the trial phases meanHow a treatment moves from first tests in people to approval.
More details
For doctors and researchers: how the study is designed, who runs it, and its registry IDs.
Study design
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Phase N/A
- Primary purpose
- Health services research
- Allocation
- Randomised
- Intervention model
- Parallel groups
- Model description
- Two-arm single-blinded randomized controlled feasibility trial.
- Masking
- Single blind
- Who is masked
- Outcomes assessor
- Enrolment
- 100 participants (estimated)
Sponsor and investigators
- Lead sponsor
- Tung Wah College
- Sponsor type
- University, hospital or other
- Responsible party
- Principal investigator, Ken HM HO, Tung Wah College
IDs, dates and publications
- ClinicalTrials.gov ID
- NCT03726034
- Sponsor's protocol ID
- RESC2018013
- Status last verified
- Mar 2019
- First submitted
- 22 Oct 2018
- Last updated
- 20 Mar 2019
- Results posted
- No
- Data monitoring committee
- Yes
- FDA-regulated drug
- No
- FDA-regulated device
- No
- Individual data sharing
- No: The data to be shared will include the measured outcomes.
Publications
Lai CKY, Igarashi A, Yu CTK, Chin KCW. Does life story work improve psychosocial well-being for older adults in the community? A quasi-experimental study. BMC Geriatr. 2018 May 16;18(1):119. doi: 10.1186/s12877-018-0797-0.
PubMed 29769035
Study at a glance
From the registry record, last updated by the sponsor on 20 Mar 2019. Recruitment status is as the sponsor reported it: confirm with the study team.
- Official title
- Life Story Work for Promoting Relationship Between Older Adults and live-in Migrant Caregivers: a Randomized Controlled Feasibility Trail
- ClinicalTrials.gov ID
- NCT03726034
- Acronym / sponsor ID
- RESC2018013
- Conditions
- Home Caregiver-older Adults Relationship
- Keywords
- Caregiver relationship, Life story book, migrant caregivers, older adults, randomized controlled trial
- Study type
- Interventional
- Recruitment status
- Unknown status
- Enrolment
- 100 participants (estimated)
- Lead sponsor
- Tung Wah CollegeUniversity, hospital or other
- Study start
- Jun 2019 (estimated)
- Primary completion
- Aug 2020 (estimated)
- Study completion
- Dec 2020 (estimated)
- First posted
- 31 Oct 2018 (actual)
- Results
- Not posted in the source record
Clinical summary
The research question as the sponsor registered it. This describes what the study plans to test, not what it found.
The relationship between older adults and live-in migrant caregivers is always challenged by weak emotional connectedness, ineffective communication, power struggling and unmet needs of both, that may lead to poor care quality and negatively influence their well-being. The aim of this study is to explore the feasibility to train live-in migrant caregivers to adopt Life Story Work for promoting the dyadic relationship with the older adults, through communication and negotiation, mutual understanding and expression of needs. This is a two-arm randomized controlled trial. The caregivers of the intervention group will receive training on life story work. Then they will be asked to create a life storybook of the older adult at home individually, with the support from the team. The caregivers in the control group will receive training on communication skills only, and will be asked to conduct social activities at home. Outcomes such as quality of relationship; well-being, depressive symptoms and level of loneliness of the older adults; and job satisfaction of the caregivers will be assessed at baseline, post-intervention and 3 months follow up. Focus group interviews will be conducted with the caregivers of the intervention group for soliciting their comments regarding to the intervention.
Detailed description
There are approximately 21.5 million live-in migrant workers, and around 41% of them are employed in Asia. Among the 352 thousand live-in migrant workers in Hong Kong, at least 21% of them are caregivers of older adults. The 2016 Policy Address suggested a pilot scheme for training live-in migrant caregivers to take care of the older people in Hong Kong to meet the trend of Ageing in Place, and cope with the dreadful shortage of formal long-term care services. As such, Social Welfare Department of Hong Kong is now implementing an 18-month pilot scheme to train live-in migrant workers to care for older adults in order to improve the well-being of the older adults. However, there is no effective evidence-based intervention available for such caregiving arrangement, not only locally but also internationally. The common training for live-in migrant workers is about instrumental training, such as feeding and bathing. According to the Relationship-Centred Care Model, relationship is the core for good quality of care. Life story work have been tested effective in various settings for promoting the psychological well-being of older adults with/out dementia, as well as proven useful in promoting mutual understanding and communication between caregivers and care-recipients.
The project is of value in that:
- It is a pioneer study, which aims to promote relationship between live-in migrant caregivers and older adults to support good quality of care.
- The life story work is a skill that is easily learnt and adopted for promoting and sustaining good relationship that may impact on the well-being of caregivers and care-recipients.
- Reduce the needs of formal long-term care services by retaining the older adults to be cared at home.
- The life story work has a potential to be adopted by all types of caregivers (including formal and informal caregivers; live-in and live-out) for promoting the caregiver-care recipient dyadic relationship through communication and negotiation between the dyads, mutual understanding and expression of needs.
Objectives:
- Explore the feasibility to train live-in migrant caregivers to adopt life story work;
- Explore the feasibility of trained live-in migrant caregivers to produce a life story book with the older adult at home; and
- Provide preliminary evidence of efficacy of the life story work on improving dyadic relationship, psychosocial outcomes of the older adults, and satisfaction of caregivers.
Study design
- Primary purpose
- Health services research
- Allocation
- Randomised
- Intervention model
- Parallel groups
- Masking
- Single blind (outcomes assessor)
- Number of arms
- 2
- Model description
- Two-arm single-blinded randomized controlled feasibility trial.
| Arm | Type | Receives |
|---|---|---|
| Life story book training | Experimental | Behavioral: Life Story BookThe migrant caregivers will receive training (six weekly 1.5-hour sessions) about life story approach by a part-time trained interventionist with psychology or social work background with at least three years of working experience working with older people and have basic knowledge about the life story work. After training, the migrant caregivers will be asked to produce the life story book individually at home with the older adults |
| Communication skills training | Active comparator | Behavioral: Self-selected social activitiesThe migrant caregivers who have randomly assigned into the control group will receive communication skills training (two 1.5-hour sessions) offered by another trained interventionist with psychology or social work background with at least three years of working experience working with older people. They would not receive any additional training on life story work. |
Who may qualify
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Accepted
- Age groups
- Child, Adult, Older adult
Key inclusion criteria (6 listed)
- aged 60 or above
- community dwelling
- being cared by participating migrant caregivers
- have been working for the older adutls for more than 6 months
- at least completed primary education
Key exclusion criteria (4 listed)
- unwilling to create life story book with the migrant caregivers
- not verbally communicable
- diagnosed with serious psychiatric illnesses or terminal illnesses
Eligibility is decided by the study team after screening; this overview does not establish that a patient qualifies. Full inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Interventions
| Intervention | Type | Arms |
|---|---|---|
| Life Story BookThe protocol of life story book creation is validated in Hong Kong. The life story book would contain two elements: (1) the development of the older adults over the course of his/her lifetime (i.e. from childhood to old age); and (2) the psychosocial development and ways of life of the older adults (e.g. education, marriage, career, and hobbies). The product of the intervention will be a written story with pictures or other memorabilia that are meaningful to the older adults. There is no limitation on the number of words, pages, and pictures. Four to six 60-minute scheduled sessions will be needed for the older adult and the live-in migrant caregivers to discuss and produce the lifestory book at home. | Behavioural | Life story book training |
| Self-selected social activitiesTo control the possible social interaction effects on the dyadic relationship and wellbeing, the caregivers of the control group will conduct self-selected social activities with older adult at home individually for four times weekly. | Behavioural | Communication skills training |
Primary outcome
The change in quality of migrant caregiver-older adults relationship as assessed by 4-item Lawrence quality of the caregiver-care recipient relationship scale
Time frame: basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)
General closeness, communication, similarity of views about life, and degree of getting along will be captured. Total score of the scale ranges from 4-16. Higher values represent a better quality of relationship. The cronhach's alpha for this scale was 0.85.
4 secondary outcomes
The change in loneliness of the older adults as assessed by the Chinese version of 6-item De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale
Time frame: basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)
The change in depressive symptoms of the older adults as assessed by the Chinese version of 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale
Time frame: basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)
The change in well-being of the dyad as assessed by the 12-item General Health Questionnaire
Time frame: basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)
The change in satisfaction of caregiver as assessed by the 6-item Care Work Satisfaction Scale
Time frame: basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)
Results and safety
Results are not available in the source record.
Research links
- Official record on ClinicalTrials.govLast updated by the sponsor 20 Mar 2019.
- Background: PubMed 29769035Lai CKY, Igarashi A, Yu CTK, Chin KCW. Does life story work improve psychosocial well-being for older adults in the community? A quasi-experimental study. BMC Geriatr. 2018 May 16;18(1):119. doi: 10.1186/s12877-018-0797-0.
- Individual participant dataSharing planned: No. The data to be shared will include the measured outcomes.
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Referral and contact
AzTrials does not enrol participants or take referrals. Contact the study team or a site listed below; they decide who can take part. This study is not recruiting at the moment.
Questions about this trial
What is this clinical trial studying?
A study testing Life Story Book and Self-selected social activities in people with Home Caregiver-older Adults Relationship, run by Tung Wah College.
The full registered description is in the About this study section and the official record.
Who may be eligible to take part?
The sponsor lists 6 inclusion and 4 exclusion criteria. Eligibility is decided by the study team after screening, so read the full criteria and contact a listed site.
Is this clinical trial currently recruiting?
The record says: status not confirmed, as of the sponsor's last update on 20 Mar 2019. Status can change between updates, so confirm with the study contact before making plans.
What are the possible benefits and risks?
They depend on the study and the treatment, and no study can promise a benefit. The study team explains the known risks during informed consent, before anyone joins; the record itself does not list them.
Are results available for this study?
Results are not available in the source record.
How can a doctor refer a patient or contact the research team?
Contact Ken HM HO, PhD (+852 34686803, kenho@twc.edu.hk), or a site near the patient. AzTrials does not enrol participants or take referrals.
What does the primary outcome measure?
The change in quality of migrant caregiver-older adults relationship as assessed by 4-item Lawrence quality of the caregiver-care recipient relationship scale (time frame: basline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1), 3-month follow up (T2)). It is what the study was designed to measure, not a finding.
Where can I read the original study information?
On the ClinicalTrials.gov record for NCT03726034, which also lists 1 linked publication.
Does a listing mean the treatment is approved or proven to work?
No. A listing means the study is registered. It does not show that the treatment is safe, works, or is approved by a regulator.
How often is this information updated?
AzTrials copies changed records from ClinicalTrials.gov every night and reloads the whole registry every week. The sponsor last updated this record on 20 Mar 2019.