Roybal Translational Research Center to Promote Context-Specific Caregiving of Community-Dwelling Persons Living with Alzheimer's Disease or Related Disorders

Abstract. This application seeks support for an administrative supplement to the Emory Roybal Center forDementia Caregiving Mastery (P30AG06400). We seek to develop and test a broadly accessible and readilyscalable online fully asynchronous course for family caregivers of community-dwelling persons living withdementing disorders like Alzheimer's disease to prepare them to master the new demands of their caregivingrole in the extraordinary circumstance of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Under normal circumstances,caregivers need to learn how to guide their person through safe, calm, and pleasant days. In a time of COVID-19, caregivers have to learn how to take all of the complicated precautions to keep themselves and theirpersons from being exposed to the virus. They need skills for keeping their persons occupied and calm in a"shelter in place" world where day programs or other regular outings to large group settings (e.g., places ofworship) are unavailable. And they need skills for navigating the healthcare system to manage their person'shealth in ways that minimize the need to use emergency or acute services. We seek to produce an onlinecourse that can be completed in 4-6 weeks that will develop and enhance caregivers' mastery not only toprovide effective day-to-day care guidance, but to ensure their care recipients' health and safety, and tofunction as healthcare system navigators for their care recipients. The course will engage caregivers in self-paced learning in a format tailored to and calibrated for a lay learning audience. It will be structured as a smallgroup "class," of 20-30 participants who will interact virtually but never meet as a group, and whose activitiesand exercises will be monitored by a course faculty member. In our Aim 1 activities, we propose to develop, incollaboration with an educational design consultant team, the online course designed to teach these skills. Theproject will seek input from caregivers, clinicians, and other experts - and used the Roybal Center's DesignStudio capacity - to develop the structure, content, and "feel" of the course and produce a testable prototype.In our Aim 2 activities, we will recruit 100 family caregivers to take part in a quantitative and qualitative wait-listcontrol randomized trial of the prototype course. The trial will assess usability and acceptability and it will besufficiently powered to examine the preliminary efficacy of the course to develop caregiving mastery andbenefit caregivers' well-being. Formative evaluation data, course faculty observation, and course use data willbe used to produce a revised version of the course. MPIs Hepburn and Clevenger bring psychoeducation andcontinuing education program development experience and extensive clinical and caregiver expertise to theproject - and an established working relationship with the educational consulting team. The Aim 2 test willprovide the basis for an application for a larger randomized trial through an R01 mechanism. The results of theAim 2 test will also support making the course more widely available through reliable channels that can provideappropriate course supervision, such as the NIA-supported Alzheimer's Disease Centers.