Abstract
Background: The world is facing many socio-demographic changes, such as an increased average life expectancy and the presence of chronic and non-communicable diseases, which in turn, leads to an enhanced dependency on others. Consequently, the demand for informal caregivers has significantly increased during the past few years. Caring for a dependent person is linked to a series of burdens that often leads to physical, psychological and emotional difficulties. Taking into consideration the difficulties faced by informal caregivers, knowing in which areas of functioning they need more guidance may help to relieve their burden. Therefore, the main goal of this study is to better understand the needs and competencies of the informal caregiver when caring for a dependent person in the different self-care domains.
Methods: cross-sectional study using face-to-face interviews. Descriptive and inferential statistics alongside non-parametric statistical techniques such as the Mann-Whitney test and Spearman’s correlation were used.
Results: The average age of the informal caregivers is 58 years old, with the youngest in our sample being 21 years of age. Most of them are female, and 50% of them are children taking care of one of their parents. Most of the dependent people are completely dependent in the areas of comfort and hygiene (53.8%) and medication management (55.9%). The female informal caregivers see themselves as having more competencies in sanitary hygiene than the male ones, with no significant differences in their competencies’ perception in the other areas of self-care. Older caregivers see themselves as less competent in certain areas of self-care such as feeding, mobility, transfers, medication and symptoms management and communication. Most part of the information given to the informal caregiver is about the disease (82.3%) and about the medication management (80.4%). There are still a lot of areas of self-care, where no information, or almost none, is given to the informal caregivers.
Conclusions: Prior to home discharge of a dependent person, it is important to acknowledge the needs and competencies of the informal caregiver, to capacitate them in looking after their relatives, in order to help decrease their burden and consequently, decrease the number of hospital readmissions.
Exploration of COVID-19-Based Changes to Caregiver Burden and Caregiving Intensity among Informal Caregivers
