The effect of the aphasia family support programme- SPPARC on the relatives of individuals with aphasia

Aphasia is a language problem that develops after damage to the dominant left hemisphere for the language whose impact has been proven in the language perception and production process and to expression and receptive language skills. It occurs in approximately 32% of people who have had a stroke. This study was carried out to translate of the SPPARC family education programme prepared for the relatives of aphasic individuals and their relatives into Turkish and to investigate its effect on the psychosocial status of families. In this study, an experimental model with a pre-test-post-test control group was used to determine psycsocihological conditions, social effects, and burden of caregiving and quality of life experienced by the relatives of individuals with aphasia. The participants of the study consist of 40 people in total, 20 participants in the experimental group and 20 participants in the control group. While no intervention was made for the control group, Aphasia Family Support Programme was implemented to experimental group consisting of 8 sessions. As data collection tools; Depression Anxiety Stress Scale, Caregiver Burden Scale and World Health Organization Quality of Life Scale were used in this study. The results of this study demonstrated that, the experimental and control groups did not differ in terms of the pre-test scores they got from (p>.05); while they differed significantly in terms of post-test scores (p<.05). The total post-test scores of the experimental group increased significantly in comparison to the pre-test scores (p<.05); while no increase was found in the control group (p>.05). With the result, it is seen that the Aphasia Family Support Programme is effective in positively changing the psychosocial status of families with aphasia reducing the burden of caregiving and increasing their quality of life. Keywords: Aphasia, Family support programme, Relatives of individuals with aphasia