Course teacher Janet Holmen

After graduating she worked for nearly two decades as an administrator at Sweden's main biomedical university, Karolinska Institutet, where an important part of her job was to edit scientific manuscripts. In 1998, Janet started teaching courses in scientific writing at Karolinska Institutet. The course was originally developed as part of the basic curriculum required for all PhD students. "Writing Science" quickly became one of the Institute's most popular courses.

Janet moved to Norway in 2004 but she still teaches at Karolinska Institutet several times each year. Janet has also worked for nearly a decade in the editorial offices of two international peer-reviewed journals: Life Sciences, where she served as editorial assistant and managing editor, and Polar Research, where she was editor. This gives her extensive experience of an aspect of publication that researchers seldom see with their own eyes. In her courses, Janet gives prospective authors a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes at an editorial office.

Janet Holmén currently lives in Svalbard, where she does free-lance work as a linguistic editor and teacher. Student comments about the course: • Writing science was excellent in many ways. Challenging, demanding and fun. • I think this is one of, if not, The most useful of all courses during the PhD program- Thanks!! • Writing Science, writing and especially REWRITING an application after receiving comments has been VERY useful.

Information from Janet

Background and purpose

Spouses are often the most important caregivers for persons who have suffered a stroke. However, being a caregiver for a stroke patient is often a heavy burden and many caregivers feel that their quality of life decreases. We have carried out a prospective study to examine whether it was possible to identify factors that could serve as early predictors of the quality of life of a person who is caring for a spouse who has suffered a stroke, one year after the stroke.

Methods

In the initial phase of the clinical rehabilitation process, we measured characteristics of both the patient and his/her caregiver. These characteristics included psychological factors, harmony in the relationship and social support. When one year had gone by since the stroke, we assessed the effect the caretaking task had had on the caregiver by using several validated instruments. Thus, we measured caregiver burden using the Caregiver Strain Index, life satisfaction using the Life Satisfaction Checklist and, finally, depressive symptoms using the Goldberg Depression Scale. The total number of participants was 187. Multiple regression analyses were performed to analyze the combined effect of the variables and characteristics we had studied on the caregiver spouses’ quality of life. Results: About 80% of the spouses reported that they had a low quality of life on one or more of the measures of caregiver burden we had studied. Fifty-two percent reported that they had depressive symptoms, 54% felt that they were under significant strain and only 50% were satisfied with their life as a whole. The regression analysis identified “passive coping strategy of the caregiver” as the most important predictor of burden, life satisfaction and depression. Of the baseline characteristics of the patient, only dependency in activities of daily living was significantly related to burden and life satisfaction, but it only explained 0-4% of the variance. Conclusions: The results of this study show that a large proportion of caregivers of stroke patients perceive that their quality of life is impaired 1 year after the stroke. Caregivers who run a heightened risk of experiencing impaired quality of life should be identified at the start of rehabilitation. Our results imply that this can readily be done by means of instruments that measure coping strategies. Interventions that have potential to prevent or treat emotional disturbance in caregivers will likely benefit not only the caregiver him/herself, but also the stroke patient he/she is caring for.