The project
Caregiving of a person with a chronic disease can also be a contributing factor to poor screening adherence.
The project aims to develop a mobile phone-based health intervention, as a means to enhance preventive health care behavior among informal carers population with tailored individual messages, covering broad content areas while also overcoming restrictions to place and time of delivery.
European guidelines are in place for the provision of mammography screening for the early detection
of breast cancer, although, women for various reasons (e.g. lack of knowledge, limited health literacy) do not attend these screenings as expected despite their awareness on the availability of preventive cancer screening tests.
Women who assume the role of the informal carer face additional challenges in engaging in health promotion practices such as BC screening. Explicitly, studies on carers’ health behaviors stress the presence of impaired health behaviors, such as neglecting health care appointments, eating a poor-quality diet, limited exercise time and forgetting to take prescribed medications, compared to non-carers.
The project aims to develop a mobile phone-based health intervention, as a means to enhance preventive health care behavior among informal carers’ population with tailored individual messages, covering broad content areas while also overcoming restrictions to place and time of delivery.
The specific objectives of the project are:
(1)to create a methodology and relevant
contents extending informal carers’ knowledge regarding the impact of their prevention avoidance behavior on BC development
(2) to educate and enhancing them to assume control over this disease through adopting and maintaining changes in their lifestyle and living practices. These include modifications of their lifestyle habits, self-monitoring, self-assessment and reinforcement of positive behaviors as well as encouragement of use of preventive BC services.
(3)To develop a personalized mobile application (i.e. personal characteristics, needs and preferences),which will support informal carers to better manage self-care and behaviour change in illness prevention.