Burden of caring for people with dementia – comparing family caregivers and professional caregivers. A descriptive study

Abstract

Purpose

Caring for people with dementia is known to be accompanied by burden for the caregiver. This study aims at describing family caregivers’ and professional caregivers’ burden immediately after hospitalization of the person with dementia.

Materials and methods

Twenty-five family caregivers and twenty-five professional caregivers of the locked gerontopsychiatric ward of a hospital in Northern Germany completed a questionnaire (BIZA-D-PV), which was evaluated in matched samples. The distribution of frequencies, differences in mean values and correlations were determined. Furthermore, family caregivers were categorized into risk groups.

Results

Family caregivers perceived a higher burden due to cognitive impairment as well as aggressive and disoriented behavior of the person with dementia compared to professional caregivers. Differences with regard to care tasks were not detected. Female family caregivers rated a higher burden compared to male family caregivers, whereas in the sample of professional caregivers males perceived a higher burden. Correlations between several dimensions of burden and caregivers’ age, severity of dementia as well as physical symptoms were described. Categorizing family caregivers into risk groups showed high risks for depression of the caregiver, violence against the person with dementia and institutionalization of the person with dementia within the next months in 44–72% of cases.

Conclusion

Our findings emphasize the importance of acquiring knowledge about caregivers’ burden in the course of time in order to develop targeting interventions to decrease caregivers’ burden and to prevent hospital admissions of people with dementia due to a crisis of home caring.

Keywords:

• care of older people
• informal care
• formal care
• nursing care
• gerontopsychiatric hospital
• cross-sectional study

Acknowledgment

The study was conducted at the Evangelic Hospital “Bethanien” as a part of the “Johanna Odebrecht” Foundation in Greifswald, Germany. The authors would like to thank Prof Dr J Langosch, Dr K Rieck and Y Weidemann for their guidance and support as well as every caregiver who participated in this study despite limited time resources.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.