The difficulties of family members who are responsible oncaregiving to alzheimer patients at home

Improvements and developments on technological and scientific areas expand the average lifespan, increase the rate of elderly age population and the demographic changes on population have brought many problems in the world. One of these problem is Alzheimer which is known as elder age health disease. There are 46,8 millions in the world, 600.000 Alzheimer patients in our country. It is expected that the rate of elder people and increasing of average lifespan will increase the number of these patients. By the increasing of elderly population and the average lifespan expectancy will further increase the rate in coming years. The spread of disease and the increasing number of patients have brought along the problem of caring. Alzheimer is different from other diseases because of the fact that it causes loss of memory, forgetfullness, behavioural and personality changes in individual and still progressive and treatment hasn't found yet. It is very devastating disease for both patient and the caregiver. In this study, it is aimed to determine the difficulties of family members who are responsible on caregiving to Alzheimer patients. The samples of the study consists of 108 patients relatives who were applied to Sinop Atatürk State Hospital. The obtained datas were analyzed with SPSS packege program. As a result of this study most of the caregivers are woman (74,1%), married (81,5%), middle-aged group (64,8%), and patient's daughter (43,5%), 38,1% with minimum wage or less income, 61,2% thinks they have disease depending on caregiving, 43,2% of them are diagnosed with psychiatic disease, 50% of them have family responsibility and 5,6% is caregiving with a sense of love bond. The majority of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer is woman (65,7%), 80 years and older ( 62,6%) and having other disease than Alzheimer (68,6%). The caregivers stated that patients are mostly in need of housework, transportation, personal hygiene, treatment, economics, clothing and excreation help while they are in need of escorting, physical care and transportation support. Caregiver family members have difficulties on "lack of selfcare", "distress disorder", "urinary problem" and "disorderance in communication" due to the symptons and disorders caused by the nature of disease while caring. However, there are some other difficultiescome out with the responsibility of caregiving like becoming "dependent at home", "no time for social life", "feeling tired", "quick irritation" and "no time for themselves". There is a statistically significant difference between caregivers age, gender, working and income status, stage of disease, duration and caregiving period with caregiver burden total inventory and average of sub-score point (p<0,05) while there isn't a statistically significant difference between caregivers marital status, education level, number of children, family structure, status of receiving homecare fee and closeness degree with caregiver burden total inventory and average of lower dimension (p>0,05).