Burden of care: an important concept for nurses

Research on family caregiving demonstrates clearly the predominance of women, particularly wives and adult daughters, among the care providers to elderly persons who are frail and chronically ill. It seems that women go to great lengths to care for impaired and elderly relatives, making personal sacrifices, often at great cost to their own health and well-being. Burden of care is a concept emerging in the literature that describes the physical, emotional, social, and financial problems that can be experienced by family caregivers. This concept may be useful to heighten understanding of the family caregiving experience and as such may provide a framework for nursing practice and research. We seek to increase nurses' awareness, through an examination of the burden-of-care literature, of the caregiving experience of women who minister to elderly parents and husbands. We also make a plea for the involvement of nurses with both givers and receivers of care and offer an approach to assessment that incorporates both the meaning and the process of caregiving.