Swiss Cohort of Health Professionals and Informal Caregivers

Summary

The healthcare system is continuously evolving to adapt to the population's needs, both in terms of healthcare practices, and in financial and organizational aspects. The current COVID-19 pandemic has added additional pressure to the healthcare system and shown its limits in terms of preparedness. It has also shown once again that both healthcare professionals (HCPs) and informal caregivers (ICs) play a central role for the functioning of the healthcare system.

An increasing number of studies are alerting on HCPs' situation, regarding their physical and mental health (e.g. emotional exhaustion, professional well-being) on the one hand, and the functioning of the healthcare system (e.g. absenteeism, turnover, career change) on the other hand.

Besides healthcare professionals, ICs, defined as "a person in the immediate entourage of an individual whose health and/or autonomy is impaired and who requires assistance with certain \[basic or instrumental\] activities of daily living. The IC provides the person, on a non-professional and informal basis, and on a regular basis, with assistance, care or presence services of varying nature and intensity, designed to compensate for their incapacities or difficulties or to ensure their safety, identity and social ties". Caring for others has shown to have negative impact on the ICs' life, in terms of health-related implications, psychological burden, quality of life, etc. Despite being increasingly recognized as having a key role in the provision of care, they have only been limitedly considered in studies on healthcare professionals.

In that context, the investigators develop SCOHPICA project, the Swiss cohort of healthcare professionals and informal caregivers, which is an open prospective national cohort using a concurrent embedded mixed method design. This project targets all types of HCPs and ICs, and will investigate determinants of intent to stay and well-being according to participants' trajectories.

Conditions

• Healthcare Professional
• Informal Caregiver

Interventions

OTHER

Electronic surveys

Online questionnaires is used to collect data, at recruitment and follow-up once a year. For the ICs, paper questionnaire will be provided upon request.

OTHER

Qualitative Interviews

Remote focus groups or semi-structured interviews will be proposed to a subsample of the participants, first in 2025 and then every two years

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Institut et Haute Ecole de la Santé la Source

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Lausanne Hospitals

  collaborator OTHER

• Haute école de travail social et de la santé Lausanne - HETSL

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Center for Primary Care and Public Health (Unisante), University of Lausanne, Switzerland

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Isabelle Peytremann-Bridevaux, MD, DSc, MPH · Unisanté

Eligibility

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2022-10-01

Primary Completion

2026-01-31

Completion

2026-12-31

Countries

• Switzerland

Study Locations