Managing Chronic Illness in the Family: A Systematic Review

Having a family member with a chronic illness affects relationships, roles, hierarchies, and the family system in general, and challenges the family to manage and adapt to the new circumstances. The purpose of this review of the research literature is to identify the issues that the family faces in managing a member's chronic illness. For this purpose, a systematic review was conducted to review articles published in Persian and English in domestic and foreign journals since 2014 (Dey 1392) in the databases of SID, Magiran, Google Scholar, APA Psycnet, Cochrane Library, Science Direct and PubMed. 15 studies were selected and reviewed. The results showed that the studies enumerated the specific issues of chronic illness management in the family, in the form of several topics, which are: motivation of family members in patient care, the effects of the illness on the family, family needs in the face of chronic illness and how to cope with chronic illness. Awareness of these issues will help professionals provide support and design appropriate interventions for these families and guide future research.