engleski

Psychosocial Aspect of Elderly Care for the family member with Alzheimer’ s disease

Caring for a family member with Alzheimer’ s disease and related dementias (ADRD), as many authors describe, is one of the most devastating and challenging experiences one person can endure. The care for people with AD requires complete commitment and drastically changes the life of entire family, according to the stage of disease. Family constitutes the major caregiving response to the needs of the elderly who are no longer self-sufficient (Aguglia et al., 2004). As many studies confirmed, three-quarters of the caregiver’ s day is devoted to the patient, that proportion tends to increase linearly as the disease progresses (Aguglia et al., 2004). The burden of performing various tasks, affect all spheres of the caregiver’ s life— psychological, professional, financial (that caregivers are often obliged to reduce the number of hours worked or even to leave their jobs to be able to look after their relatives), and relational (Aguglia et al., 2004, Shua-Haim et al., 2001 ; Juozapavicius & Weber, 2001). Therefore, taking care of family member with Alzheimer’ s disease is very demanding and stressful roll for caregivers, who also become a victim of disease, and who need to find better ways of coping with and managing the progressively deteriorating stages of Alzheimer’ s disease (Juozapavicius & Weber, 2001 ; Feeney et al., 2003). The aim of this research was: identification of the common problems that caregivers are facing in dealing with care for Alzheimer, to take the wider social-demographical context of the caregiver, stressors, mediators, consequences and the possible facilitators of the care giving process. This research puts focus on the caregiver’ s experience, on understanding the difficulties which they are facing in everyday care for the family member, taking into consideration feelings, distress sings (depression, grief, care giving stress), care giving influence on the caregivers physical health and the quality of the support from the family members, institutions and wider community.

caregiver; caregivers stress; depression; grieving; difficulties; support

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