Family Caregiving for Cancer Patients: the State of the Literature and a Direction for Research to Link the Informal and Formal Care Systems to Improve Quality and Outcomes.

OBJECTIVES: Based on recent shifts in reimbursement for cancer treatment from fee-for-service to bundled and value-based payment, this concluding article summarizes data from these papers and the large body of literature on caregiving to suggest how caregiving research might be redirected to link the formal with the informal systems to achieve higher-quality and lower-cost care. Caregiver dyads, the tasks of care, and strategies for training are presented. DATA SOURCES: Articles in this issue of Seminars in Oncology Nursing, the larger body of caregiving literature, and the Oncology Care Model driving bundled payments and value-based care.
CONCLUSION: Research on informal caregiving for cancer patients should begin to reframe the rich body of evidence available toward a focus on caregivers reactions to the tasks of care, the training necessary for caregivers to perform them, and how each contributes to quality care at lower costs and appropriate outcomes given patients' stage of disease and goals of treatment. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING PRACTICE: Oncology systems must take a more active role in including patients and their families as partners to manage treatments and side effects to achieve the best possible patient outcomes. They must be able to evaluate the patient and the caregiver to determine what tasks they will be able to perform, and then make sure they have the training and resources to carry out those tasks. Training could be done by social media and through communication using patient portals that could be expanded through the electronic medical records to include caregiver portals, enabling caregiver questions and reports of patients' conditions.