Abstract
•A time burden, financial strain, and prioritizing care recipient needs over their own are key barriers preventing informal caregivers from engaging in health-promoting self-care.•Primary healthcare providers are well positioned to assess and support informal caregivers.•Despite positive attitudes of primary healthcare providers, knowledge deficit and system level barriers prevent the integration of a caregiver assessment in practice.•A caregiver identification process, user-friendly assessment tool, and system level changes are needed to provide optimal health care to older informal caregivers.
A time burden, financial strain, and prioritizing care recipient needs over their own are key barriers preventing informal caregivers from engaging in health-promoting self-care. Primary healthcare providers are well positioned to assess and support informal caregivers. A cross sectional descriptive, correlational study was used to examine the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of healthcare providers regarding assessment and support of older informal caregivers. The Healthcare Professional Facilitated Health Promotion (HPFHP) Model guides this study by depicting the collaborative patient-healthcare professional relationship. The Caregiver Self-Care Survey for Healthcare Providers measured the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of 80 healthcare providers on assessing and supporting older informal caregivers. Descriptive and inferential statistics were calculated using IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 28.0 software. Results indicated that despite positive attitudes, knowledge deficit and system level barriers prevented integration of caregiver assessment in practice. A caregiver identification process, user-friendly assessment tool, and system level changes are overdue.