How should we understand and facilitate mutual support for mental wellbeing between patients with chronic physical conditions and their supporters?

Problem

Chronic physical conditions can negatively affect the mental wellbeing of both the patient and the family and friends supporting them. Studies of unmet needs in these populations have identified a thirst for strategies that help patients and their supporters to look after each other’s mental wellbeing, but research into how to facilitate this mutual support is scarce. Qualitative research is required to understand what these groups want to know about mental wellbeing in the context of coping together; how they experience the interaction between chronic conditions, mental wellbeing and relationships; and what their ideas and preferences are for an intervention facilitating mutual support for mental wellbeing.

Approach

Individual and dyadic interviews are being conducted with patients and their supporters living with cancer, chronic pain, coronary heart disease, dementia and/or stroke. Some participants are recruited as individuals, while others are recruited as dyads. Those recruited as dyads are first interviewed together, then separately and simultaneously by two interviewers working closely together with a shared worldview on both qualitative enquiry and the phenomenon of dyadic coping. Participants also complete brief validated questionnaires exploring how they cope with problems both individually and within relationships. Interview transcripts are being analysed using a combination of thematic analysis and the framework method.

Findings

Interviews are ongoing. Findings regarding what patients and supporters want to know about mental wellbeing in the context of living with a chronic physical condition, how they experience the interaction between chronic physical conditions, mental wellbeing, coping mechanisms, relationships and supportive behaviours, and their ideas and preferences for an intervention facilitating mutual support for mental wellbeing will be available to present at the ASM.

Consequences

Findings from this qualitative work will be synthesised with results from completed literature reviews and forthcoming focus groups to develop a relevant, acceptable and evidence-based intervention framework facilitating mutual support for mental wellbeing. In doing so, this work will promote the more efficient, more cost-effective, and thus more widely available delivery of mental wellbeing support to patients and supporters living with chronic physical conditions.