Safety and health challenges affecting the informal caregivers of children

ABSTRACT

Informal caregiving of children with special needs is a complex entity with a mixture of different caregiving tasks performed on a regular basis. This study is focused on the perceptions of the safety and health challenges of the informal caregivers of children with special needs in Finland. An in-depth analysis was conducted on data collected from 25 qualitative interviews. The main safety and health challenges that emerged from the data analysis included issues with caregiving arrangements and related bureaucracy, anxiety because of the financial situation they are in, uncertainty on certain caregiving tasks and constant worry about the child’s health. The informal caregivers are tired, endure children’s aggressive behaviour and have physical discomfort and stress. Informal caregiving is discussed in the context of work system theory and recommendations for future studies are presented. The results indicated the need to understand better the challenges confronted in informal caregiving in order to develop practices, services and policies for the informal caregivers of children.

KEYWORDS:

• Health
• human factors and ergonomics
• informal caregiver of child
• safety
• work system

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by The Foundation for Municipal Development sr. is a Finnish foundation.