BACKGROUND The current policy guidelines on mental health aim to keep the mentally ill within the community, with the development of social support, including families, hence the emergence of the role of the family caregiver. OBJECTIVES To identify socio-demographic variables influencing anxiety, depression and stress for the informal caregivers of the mentally ill; to determine the influence...

REFERENCE 1. National Family Caregivers Association. Who are family caregivers? http://www.thefamilycaregiver.org/who_are_family _caregivers/care_giving_statstics.cfm. Accessed November 29, 2010. A ccording to the National Alliance for Caregiving, in any given year more than 65 million people provide care for a chronically ill, disabled, or aged family member or friend. The caregiver burden mus...

Objective: In this study, we aimed to describe the burden of family caregivers providing powered wheelchair-related and overall assistance and test the hypotheses that caregiver burden correlates with participation, wheelchair skills capacity, anxiety, depression, and social support. Methods: Cross-sectional study. Participants included 35 family caregivers of powered wheelchair users. Caregive...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to assess the feasibility and acceptability of an intervention to reduce mental health problems and bolster resilience among children living in households affected by caregiver HIV in Rwanda. DESIGN Pre-post design, including 6-month follow-up. METHODS The Family Strengthening Intervention (FSI) aims to reduce mental health problems among HIV-affecte...

PURPOSE There is a growing consensus that quality of care for frail elders should include family and be evaluated in terms of patient-centered, family-focused care (PCFFC). Family caregivers are in a unique and sometimes sole position to evaluate such care. In the context of caring for physically frail elders, this study examined the extent to which objective burden was associated with caregive...

OBJECTIVE The present study prospectively examined the development of child PTSD symptoms (PTSS) and the impact of caregiver PTSS on child PTSS following injury. METHODS One hundred and eighteen ED patients and their caregivers were interviewed in-hospital and 2- and 6-weeks posttrauma. Structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear regressions examined the development of PTSS. RESULT...

Family Caregivers: The Backbone of Long Term Care Lynn Friss Feinberg, National Center on Caregiving Lynn Friss Feinberg, MSW, is Deputy Director of the National Center on Caregiving at the San Francisco-based Family Caregiver Alliance. She was director and first author of a recently completed 50-state survey, funded by the U.S. Administration on Aging, to profile the “State of the States in Fa...

OBJECTIVE The current study examined the role of alternate caregivers (i.e., caregivers living outside of the home who spend at least 6 hr per week caring for the child) in a sample of Latino and non-Latino White (NLW) families with a child with asthma. METHODS Participants included 665 families of children with asthma from NLW, Puerto Rican, and Dominican backgrounds from Rhode Island and Pu...

BACKGROUND We examined the associations of informal (eg, family members and friends) and formal (eg, physician and visiting nurses) social support with caregiver's burden in long-term care and the relationship between the number of available sources of social support and caregiver burden. METHODS We conducted a mail-in survey in 2003 and used data of 2998 main caregivers of frail older adults...

OBJECTIVE: To examine reports of verbal and physical abuse from family caregivers of adults with severe physical, neurological and developmental disabilities, and examine possible associations of abuse with family caregiver adjustment. DESIGN: Cross-sectional. PARTICIPANTS: 147 community-residing caregivers (129 women, 18 men) of adults with disabilities (66 men, 81 women). MEASURES: Caregiver ...