Caregivers Conquering Challenges of Daily Living: A Secondary Analysis

Family caregivers face many challenges providing daily care for someone with dementia. These challenges have a wide range, including assisting the individual with dementia with hygiene and meals, to worrying about their safety and wellbeing constantly. The purpose of this study was to uncover the diverse challenges and anxiety that caregivers experience, as they assist the person with dementia in daily tasks. After IRB approval, a secondary analysis was conducted using de-identified interview data from eight family caregivers who participated in a qualitative phenomenology study. Using a secondary analysis, it became evident that informal family caregivers face many challenges in caring for an individual with dementia and they are able to overcome these challenges. Amid trying circumstances, caregivers delayed responsibilities including medication administration and hygiene. Meanwhile, in a formal caregiving setting, such as a hospital, these are priority responsibilities. Caregivers put a larger emphasis on safety concerns for the patient, while sacrificing their quality of life, sleep, and mental health. These sacrifices often lead to a degree of anger and frustration. Upon reflection, caregivers were able to create a separation between the person and the disease and realized that their anger is geared toward the dementia and its progression. The caregivers faced changes in their quality of life, that they ultimately deemed inevitable and just learned to live with. In order to cope with these, and many other challenges, caregivers sought out support groups and accepted assistance from family and friends. It became evident that the caregivers became heavily reliant on these measures of support. The identified challenges could be targets for future interventions and research to help family caregivers manage these challenges. Additionally, similar studies could be conducted in the future with groups of caregivers that do not utilize support groups, in order to identify their unique struggles and develop interventions respectively.