Study published: Implementation of e-mental health interventions for informal caregivers

Implementing e-mental health interventions for informal caregivers into practice can be challenging. To get a better understanding of what is already known about factors that make implementation easier or harder, researchers searched for studies that explored the implementation of e-mental health interventions for informal caregivers. The findings of these studies were put together to come up with a list of barriers and facilitators to implementation.

What was the main finding?

A lot of these barriers and facilitators were about what it was like to use the intervention, for example, whether interventions were easy to use, and whether the content was helpful. There was also a lot of information about what informal caregivers and other professionals thought about e-mental health interventions, such as the benefits these interventions may have for informal caregivers.

But the review also highlighted lots of gaps in our understanding. As Chelsea Coumoundouros, one of the study authors, says:

– Very few of the studies we found explored barriers and facilitators related to the environment where implementation was taking place. Moving forward, studies should focus more on how e-mental health interventions for informal caregivers will fit into practice outside of academic environments.

Read the full paper ‘Implementation of e-mental health interventions for informal caregivers of adults with chronic diseases: a mixed-methods systematic review with qualitative comparative analysis and thematic synthesis’. It is written by Chelsea Coumoundouros, Erika Mårtensson, Giulia Ferraris, Justine Margaux Zuidberg, Louise von Essen, Robbert Sanderman, and Joanne Woodford.