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Spouse caregivers’ attributed gains from a skill-based counseling program

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Abstract

Objective

To describe spouse caregivers’ perceived gains in their own words from participating in a fully manualized 5-session educational counseling program whose goals were to enhance their self-care and skills to interpersonally support their wife with breast cancer.

Methods

Interviews from 81 spouses obtained 7 months after exiting from a fully manualized educational counseling program, Helping Her Heal, were content analyzed using inductive coding methods adapted from grounded theory. Trustworthiness of study results was protected by coding to consensus, formal peer debriefing, and maintaining an audit trail.

Results

Analysis yielded 3 conceptual domains: Giving Me Structure; Adding Skills to Help Her and Us; and Gaining Insights into Myself and My Wife, all of which reflected practical things on which spouses could take action and ways they could take care of themselves, support their wife, and from which they gained insight into their own and their wife’s response to the breast cancer.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that short-term, fully manualized counseling programs can provide opportunities and practical ways spouse caregivers are able to gain interpersonal communication, self-care skills, and personal insights. This scripted model of counseling is a way in which to deliver educational counseling with self-reported benefits, even though the program is fully scripted and not uniquely fashioned for each caregiver’s unique experience.

Clinical trial registration numbers

NCI-2013-01838.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

Authors acknowledge the spouses who participated in the study and other members of the research team, K.A. Griffith, statistician, Mary Ellen Shands, Natasha Grossman, Taryn Ostereich, and Alicia Korkowski.

Funding

This study was supported by National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, RO1-CA-114-561, and UW Medical Center Endowed Professor of Nursing Leadership.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Child, Family & Population Health, University of Washington, Seattle, 1959 Pacific Street, Box 357262, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    Ellen H. Zahlis & Frances Marcus Lewis

Authors
  1. Ellen H. Zahlis
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  2. Frances Marcus Lewis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ellen H. Zahlis.

Ethics declarations

Approval was obtained from the ethics committee of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute, Institutional Review Board (IRB file# 8061). The procedures used in this study adhere to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

Consent to participate

Written informed consent was obtained from all participants included in the study.

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Zahlis, E.H., Lewis, F.M. Spouse caregivers’ attributed gains from a skill-based counseling program. Support Care Cancer 29, 4389–4394 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-021-05985-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-021-05985-5

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