Psychological Effects of Providing Care to Chronic Patients in Family Caregivers. A Review Study

Family caregivers are one of the first and most important members involved in following up the treatment and care of patients with chronic diseases who suffer from many complications in the long run. The purpose of this article is to review the studies conducted on the psychological effects of providing care to chronic patients in family caregivers.

This systematic review by searching Persian articles with the keywords of Family caregivers, psychological complications and chronic disease in valid databases such as SID, IranDoc, Iran Medex , Magiran,Web of Sciences, PubMed, and Scopus from 2011 to 2021. A total of 805 articles were found. 18 articles were extracted from them. Inclusion criteria included originality, writing in Persian and English, and compliance with the purpose of the study, and exclusion criteria included not having access to the full text of the article.

Caring for patients with chronic diseases has a variety of common psychological effects on family caregivers, including Caregiver Burden, burnout, fatigue, compassion fatigue, stress and anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, and social stigma.

Due to the many and different psychological effects of providing care to chronic patients in family caregivers, it is necessary to make proper plans for nursing interventions and to pay attention to patients’ families in the direction of comprehensive nursing care.