Under the COVID-19 pandemic, elderly people are amongst all the most vulnerable members of our community. They are one of the populations most at risk of becoming seriously ill and dying from COVID-19. In Hong Kong, there are confirmed cases in 580 facilities for elderly in the fifth wave of the pandemic, which has seriously affected those elderly in need of care and also posed big challenges for caregivers regardless in nursing homes or care recipients’ own homes. CityU adopts and promotes the “One Health” approach to design measures to safeguard public health and to respond to the public health challenges worldwide. An online seminar was held on 8 April 2022 to look into the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on formal and informal caregivers.
To kick off the seminar, the moderator Dr Dannii YEUNG, the Associate Professor of the Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences of CityU introduced the three speakers and their research topics on caregiving. The first speaker was Professor Marcus CHIU Yu-lung, who is the Visiting Professor of the University of Bolton, UK. He talked about the challenges of delivering psychoeducation programme for family caregivers of community dwelling senior in pandemic time. His findings also showed that although online psychoeducation programme might not be as powerful as physical in-attendant programmes, some improvements are still observed in the intervention group in the aspect of wellbeing, and meaning making of one’s own role, better efficacy of access to community resources, and willingness to offer help to others.
The second speaker was Winnie LAM Wing-yee, who is a doctoral researcher working for the Institute of Work Psychology under Sheffield University Management School, UK. She shared with audience her research on the role of emotion regulation in managing paid work and informal elder care. By focusing on the cognitive elements of emotional regulation, she hoped that the research work can potentially contribute to intervention development by establishing the link between work, care and emotion regulation.
The last presentation was given by Dr ZHANG Fan, the Assistant Professor of the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, School of Medicine, Jinan University, China. The research project investigated the relationship between formal caregiver's behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) knowledge and positive experiences of caregiving (PAC), and how their attitude and self-efficacy mediate or moderate this relationship. The result showed that greater BPSD knowledge was associated with increased PAC, and this relationship was fully mediated by increased friendly attitude toward people with dementia. It provides insights for developing psychoeducation programmes among formal caregivers by elucidating the knowledge-attitude-practice pathway in handling dementia patients’ symptoms.
For those who are interested in the global public health issues, don’t miss the rest of One Health Seminars which will be held on 28 April and 5 May 2022. Please click the links below for more details and registration.
28 April 2022: New Trends in Health Communication
5 May 2022: Global Public Health: Vaccines and Aid around the World