Exploring the effectiveness of couples interventions for adults living with a chronic physical illness: A systematic review

Couples living with type 1 diabetes: An integrative review of the impacts on health and wellbeing

“…Our findings concur with those of others in concluding that long-term conditions are challenging and demanding for the whole family (Berry et al, 2017;Kiecolt-Glaser and Wilson, 2017). The aggregated evidence in our study around preventing and managing hypoglycaemic events strengthen assumption made by Berry and Colleagues (2017) that diabetes is not interpreted as a shared challenge, but that PWD and their partners appraise the illness differently and consequently adapt different behavior strategies.…”

“…This information may be an important cue for Health Care Professionals for enquiring about the quality of support provided within that relationship and opportunities for offering support to partners and pwd to work together to manage diabetes. As pointed out by Berry et al (2017) and Sturt et al (2015), the vast majority of psychoeducational interventions in type 1 diabetes described in the literature focus exclusively on PWD with only few (e.g., Hermanns et al, 2013) offering very limited support for PWD family members. However, the importance of partner support for PWD is increasingly recognised and its enhancement has become one of the main goals of current psychoeducational interventions (e.g., Chatterjee et al, 2017;van Puffelen et al, 2014).…”

“…Couples mutually influence each other's mental and physical health trajectories for good or ill (Kiecolt-Glaser and Wilson, 2017). A recent systematic review evaluating the effectiveness of couple interventions for adults living with long-term conditions found that combined relational and cognitive/skills based interventions were more effective for targeting both emotional resilience within the relationship and self-efficacy towards the long term condition than patient-only interventions (Berry et al, 2017). Type 1 diabetes treatment and self-management is part of a complex and multifactorial process influenced by individual, social and environmental variables (Gonder-Frederick et al, 2002).…”

Feasibility of the Hand in Hand Relationship Intervention for Stroke Survivor–Caregiver Dyads: A Randomized Trial

“…Interventionist self-evaluation data indicated that, going forward, interventionist training should continue to emphasize the importance of preparing carefully for each session (i.e., based upon notes from the previous session) and of strongly suggesting “homework” for dyads to do in between sessions in order to keep them engaged in the program. It also may be valuable to infuse existing interventionist training with strategies from the communication-based therapies literature (Berry et al, 2017; Carr, 2019) in order to help dyads stay focused on a single issue at once and to help them resolve relationship issues once they have been surfaced by the program procedures.…”

Managing Type 2 diabetes as a couple: The influence of partners’ beliefs on diabetes distress over time

“…conflicting or provoking beliefs) which occur between couples living with Type 2 diabetes and which engender distress, there is potential to access and target these more directly via formal intervention. Certainly previous work shows that including partners or family members in interventions designed to improve health-related outcomes in chronic illness is feasible and can be hugely effective-often more so than the equivalent patient-only intervention [27]. Studies have shown that illness beliefs [28,29,30] and communication issues [31,32]…”