Friday, 14 January 2005 - 2:00 PM

This presentation is part of: Working with Families of Persons with Severe Mental Illness

Effects of a Workshop for Aging Parents to Plan Care in the Future for Adult Children with Severe Mental Illness

Purpose: Many mid-age and older adults with severe mental illness rely on their families for care and support. Because most of such individuals do not have a spouse/partner and/or offspring, usually, their parents are still the primary caregivers. These aging parents, especially those living with the ill adult child, worry about their children's life after they no longer can provide care. A plan for the future care that is developed and carried out early on can remarkably reduce the anxiety due to uncertainty about the future. Because it can be overwhelming for parents to start planning on their own, a one-day workshop was designed to provide these parents with practical information about some important aspects of future care, including health issues, legal and financial arrangement, and social security benefits. An evaluation was conducted on the workshop to test its short-term and long-term effects on participants' knowledge, psychological well-being, and future care planning behavior.

Methods: The evaluation is a single-group pretest, posttest, and six-month follow-up design, focusing on both implementation and outcome evaluation. Questionnaires were constructed to measure the participants' workshop satisfaction, knowledge gains about future planning, sense of mastery and apprehension about the future, and actions towards future planning. All the workshop participants were invited to the evaluation.

Results: Eighteen of the 20 eligible workshop participants participated in the evaluation. Overall, participants reported high levels of satisfaction with the workshop, with mean scores ranging from 3 to 4.75 on a 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) Likert scale. Fifteen parents completed questionnaires at all three times. The results show that the workshop helped increase the parents' levels of knowledge about planning for the future (t=5.84, p<.000), and this effect was sustained through a six-month period (t=3.08, p=.009). The results also demonstrate that the parents who reported increase knowledge about planning for the future had a higher sense of mastery at both the end of the workshop (t=3.23, p=.012) and the six-month follow-up (t=2.78, p=.018). Moreover, these parents tended to take more actions to plan for the future in the six-month period (t=3.28, p=.095), including initiating discussions about future care issues with people involved and making future care arrangements, such as setting up a trust and writing down care instructions. No significant improvement was found on parents' apprehension about the future. Participants' high levels of program satisfaction served as evidence for quality of workshop implementation, which enhanced our confidence about the results of effect analyses. These findings suggest that parents can benefit from the workshop in thinking about and working toward planning for the future.

Implications for practice and policy: Helping aging parents plan future care for adult children with mental illness needs to be integrated into mental health policies and practice to empower these parents and to ensure the quality of life for these adult children in the future. In particular, families should be provided with sufficient resources and information for planning. A well-designed workshop can efficiently and effectively prepare families for this difficult, yet essential task.

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