Quality of life in primary caregivers of spinal cord injured individuals and its related factors
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Wu, Yi-Hsuan
Abstract
Over recent decades, medical advances in the care of people with spinal cord injury (SCI) have led to higher rates of survival and life expectancy, which means that people with SCI now live with their disability for a much longer period of time. Besides, caring SCI for a long time not only becomes a significant burden of primary caregivers, but also may have impact on their own quality of life (QOL). However, studies involving primary caregivers of people with SCI are still limited, and factors affecting QOL for caregivers of SCI are mostly unknown until now. The purpose of this study was to describe QOL of primary caregivers of people with SCI and to explore some important related factors of their QOL. We hope the results could help to provide some useful information for clinical intervention in the future.
The cross-sectional study was conducted by purposively sampling and the effective subjects were 30 primary caregivers of traumatic SCI, being discharged at least 6 months from the rehabilitation ward in certain medical center of North Taiwan in the past five years. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data including caregiver’s characteristics, patient’s characteristics, impairment-related condition, information related to family care condition, caregiver’s burden and caregiver’s QOL. The data was analyzed with SPSS 11.0 for Windows by descriptive statistics, t-test, one way ANOVA, and Pearson’s product moment correlation.
Overall QOL of caregivers rated with the Taiwanese WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire was 54.1 in average which is lower than that of ordinary people. Out of the four domains of the questionnaire, the physical health domain ranked the highest and the psychological domain the lowest. On the other hand, statistically significant factors affecting the QOL included the relationship between care-receivers and their caregivers, monthly household income, weekly caring frequency and caregiver’s burden. Moreover, caregivers having spousal relationship with the people with SCI showed significantly lower scores in overall QOL as well as domains of physical health and social relationship when compared with non-spouse caregivers. Compared with monthly household income over NT40,000 dollars, persons with income lower than NT40,000 dollar showed lower scores in domains including physical health, environment, and overall QOL significantly. Besides, when compared to caregivers whose weekly caring frequency was less than 2 days, those with frequency more than 5 days scored more slowly in domains of physical health, psychology, and overall QOL significantly.
In addition, there were no significant correlation between the social and emotional burden and physical health domains, between social burden and psychological domains, and between time-dependence burden and social relationship domains. Furthermore, primary caregivers who were experiencing greater overall burden, more time spent on caring, larger barrier in task development, higher level of physical fatigue, more severe interference of social life, and more intense negative emotion, showed significantly lower scores in four domains and total QOL. Also, caregivers’ burden was found to be moderately to highly correlated to the overall QOL as well as all QOL domains. Nevertheless, there was no significant difference or correlation among factors such as characteristics of patients and caregivers, impairment severity, injury time, self-care condition, the number of care assistants, and the number of care-receivers for a single caregiver.
The results of the study contribute to the understanding of the relationship between characteristics of patients and caregivers, impairment-related condition, information relating to family care condition, caregiver’s burden, and caregiver’s QOL. These findings also serve as indices for occupational therapy clinical practice, education, and research aiming to enhance the QOL of SCI caregivers. In order to help understanding and improving the QOL of SCI caregivers, it is suggested that occupational therapists should strengthen the linkage between the in-patient and community services, develop practice guidelines for home rehabilitation and home care, promote the utility of related resources, and attend the caregiver’s burden by making appropriate assessment with standard tools such as caregiver burden Inventory.
Subjects
Spinal Cord Injuries
Quadriplegia
Paraplegia
caregivers
Quality of Life
SDGs
Type
thesis
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