The Dementia Quality of Life Scale for Older Family Carers (DQoL-OC) Study

The purpose of this research is to develop the "DQoL-OC", a unique questionnaire to evaluate the quality of life of people aged 60 or above providing care for a family member with Alzheimer's disease or other related dementia at home in the UK. This questionnaire is aimed at allowing researchers, health and social professionals, as well as the older family carers themselves, to quantify the impact caring in different aspects life, for the purposes of economic evaluation or implementation and evaluation of interventions. The results from this study will also help us to understand better the aspects that affect carers' quality of life and well-being, which may guide future policies and the support provided to older family carers in the future. The DQoL-OC is being developed in two parts. The first part is now completed and was carried out through focus groups with older family carers for discussions about important aspects related to their quality of life and well-being in order to create the items of the new questionnaire. Its preliminary version contains 100 questions about the practical aspects of care and caregiving, carers' feelings and concerns and satisfaction with life and with the caring role. The second part of the DQoL-OC development is currently being carried out and aims to evaluate its validity and reliability for use with older family carers and to reduce it into a smaller number of items. About 300 older family carers are invited to answer individually the DQoL-OC and other similar questionnaires for these purposes. About 25 participants taking part in this study are invited to answer the same questions with an interval of two weeks in order to allow us to compare the results and its stability over this period of time.