Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

To help manage the biopsychosocial consequences of cancer, many patients receive care from informal caregivers who are unpaid family members or friends. But with the onset of COVID-19, caregivers are challenged in complex ways. For example, delayed patient care may increase caregiver burden, and the often-changing COVID-19 policies (e.g., hospital visit restrictions) may create impediments to performing the caregiving role. This highlights how the caregiver experience is influenced by multiple systemic levels, including the caregiver-patient relationship, hospital, and governmental policies. However, there is a lack of systemic research about caregivers. Therefore, my research will address the question: How is the cancer caregiver experience during COVID-19 understood at multiple and interacting levels within and outside of the hospital system in Canada? The proposed study will use semi-structured one-on-one interviews to understand the caregiver experience during the pandemic via perspectives of individuals at different systemic levels. First, transcripts of interviews with cancer caregivers and patients will undergo grounded theory analysis to theoretically describe the caregiver experience. Second, transcripts of interviews with health care administrators, nurses, oncologists, and cancer care directors will undergo thematic analysis to concretely describe how they navigated policy changes and how they believe this to have influenced the caregiver's experience. Third, transcripts will undergo a discourse analysis to compare how participants at different systemic levels construct and discuss factors affecting patient care. Overall, this study will provide an in-depth understanding of how the cancer caregiver experience in the pandemic context is affected by the interrelationships across systems. It will show how the pandemic ecologically affects cancer care, thereby possibly revealing areas that can be changed to improve cancer care and to relieve caregiver burden.