Quando o cuidador é idoso

: impacto físico, emocional e social do cuidador informal idoso

Abstract

The increase of the human being’s longevity and the changes of the society led to a significant increase of the elderly against the youth, making the formal support structures insufficient to such a big demand. Therefore, informal cares emerge as a helpful and profitable solution, but they bring some implications that we have to pay attention to, such as the physical, emotional and social overload of the informal caregivers. This investigation emerges in order to understand the overload of care in the ancient informal caregiver’s life. The goal is to understand how the ancient’s dependence, the caregiver’s gender and the length and time of care have an effect on the overload of care, as well as if the existence of support grids (informal and/or formal) allows to reduce that overload. A quantitative non-experimental transversal study was made, with the participation of 100 informal caregivers within the ages of 60 and 88. The main results show that the higher the ancient’s dependence, the higher the emotional overload and the higher the implications in their personal life. Concerning the gender of the caregiver, we see that men have more difficulty to find coping mechanisms that are effective to do their duty. Concerning the support grids, the ones that have help from their family are less overloaded. Concerning the care’s length, the higher the care schedule, the higher the emotional overload and the higher the implications in the caregiver’s personal life. For the ancient, the period of time of dependence seems not to influence the overload of care.

Date of Award	15 Nov 2011
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Eduardo Duque (Supervisor)