Karen Hirschman
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Family members and friends who care for older adults without pay, known as informal caregivers, are often under heavy stress. This is especially true when the person they care for is in the hospital and then comes home with complex discharge plans and skilled care needs.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
- Topics
informal caregivers
family caregiving
older adults
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Test whether ViCCY, a 10-session video health-coaching program, improves self-care more than web-based health information alone, in a randomized trial of 250 caregivers of hospitalized older adults.
- Assess whether the improvements in self-care and related outcomes are similar across caregiver demographic groups, including sex and race.
- Examine whether improving caregiver outcomes reduces 6-month acute care use, such as rehospitalization, by older adults with multiple chronic conditions, using health record data.
- Measure caregivers' stress, coping, health status and care-transition experience at 1, 3 and 6 months after enrollment.
More about the research
Many caregivers put off caring for themselves, and years of stress can make them ill. Self-care means the everyday behaviors people use to stay healthy and manage illness. The research asks whether supporting caregivers' self-care during these hospital-to-home transitions can improve their health and well-being, and possibly also the health of the older adults they care for.
Why it matters
Millions of caregivers support older adults with multiple chronic illnesses after hospital stays. If video-based health coaching is shown to work, it could be scaled up to help caregivers keep up their own self-care, lower their stress, and have a smoother transition from hospital to home. It may also reduce rehospitalization and other acute care use by the older adults they care for.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Daniel Liebzeit
University of Iowa, IA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Identify barriers and facilitators to adding the 4Ms of age-friendly care to hospital-to-home transitions through interviews with older adults, caregivers, clinicians, administrators and community service professionals.
Gayenell Magwood
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Refine the iCINGS FAM intervention through interviews and focus groups with rural community stakeholders, so that it fits individual, family, community and social needs for managing illness as a dyad.
Jia-Rong Wu
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether the nurse-delivered FamLit intervention improves medication adherence over 12 months in heart failure patients and their care partners, compared with an attention-control group, in a randomized trial of 164 dyads.
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
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