Respite care is essential for supporting families dealing with life-limiting illnesses, such as advanced cancers, by enabling them to remain at home for longer. These services provide family caregivers with short breaks from their demanding roles while also offering care-receivers social support and access to resources outside the home. Despite the high demand for respite care, these services are often under-utilized, even when available. This under-utilization can be attributed in part  to factors such as inflexible scheduling, a lack of trained palliative care providers, and feelings of guilt associated with using respite services.

For her doctoral research, Ms. Castro and Dr. Tsimicalis collaborated with nurses, family caregivers, and patients to co-design an app aimed at enhancing the accessibility of respite care services for families with advanced cancers in Quebec. In this webinar, they will present the formative design of the iRespite Services iRépit app, which includes a bilingual navigational tool for finding palliative respite care agencies in Quebec. The presentation will cover the theoretical and methodological frameworks that guided the design process, highlighting key features incorporated to improve the accessibility of the app-based service. Finally, they will discuss how the insights gained from this project can inform the design and accessibility of similar community and global oncology services.