Evaluation of family functions of parents who have children with cerebral palsy

In this study, it was aimed to evaluate the family functions of parents with SP children. Parents of 59 children enrolled in the Turkish Spastic Children Foundation in İstanbul İli Ataşehir District, parents of 6 children enrolled in Istanbul branch of SERÇEV Association and 53 children registered in special education school in Ankara and 0-18 The parents of a total of 118 children in the age group. All parents who were not allowed to participate in the study and who were accepted to take part in the study, who were literate, who had a SP diagnosis in the 0-18 age group and who had no communication difficulty were included in the study. In this study, in which the purposeful sample was discussed, data were collected between 22 February and 6 April 2017 on different days of the week. The interviews with the Turkish Spastic Children Foundation were made by the researcher in the family waiting room before and after the appointment time of the children according to the availability of the parents between 09.00-17.00 hours. In the special education school in Ankara, the data collection was carried out by the researcher in the waiting room of the school between 1 pm and 4 pm for one day. In the SERÇEV Association, collection of data was provided through the Istanbul representative of the association. It took about 15 minutes to fill out the Personal Information Form and the family function assesment device. All of the data obtained in the study were processed with the SPSS 23.0 statistical package program. Before the data was resolved, it was checked for errors.Then, the normality distributions of the data groups were examined by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test for the selection of statistical analyzes to be applied depending on the purpose of the study and the research questions. The average scores (levels) of the parents of children with SP who participated in the study vary between 1.62 ± 0.54 / 0.62 and 2.40 ± 0.58 for the dimensions of the Family Assessment Scale. There was a significant relationship between according to sociodemographic characteristics of parents; being mother and father, age, marital status, education status, working status, income status, number of children, other disabled children, sharing of care and according to sociodemographic characteristics of children; age,the child's other health problems and continued school attendance, cerebral palsy grade, time since diagnosis, use of spasticity-reducing medication (p <.05). Nurses and health professionals should take care of the child and the family as a whole while taking care of it and should consider the functions of the family with all its sub-dimensions, taking into account that the problem that may arise in the family may affect the care of the child. Keywords: Cerebral palsy, child, family, family function