Nursing Home Care and Family Caregivers’ Stress

Abstract

This chapter discusses nursing home care for older relatives. It presents an overview of knowledge about family caregivers’ stress and nursing home care and suggests future directions for research and theory in this area. In order to understand the relation between family caregivers’ stress and nursing home care, it is important to place institutional care in a broader long-term care context. Longer life expectancy affects the likelihood of nursing home care both directly and indirectly, because it has a bearing on the ages, relationships, and resources of family caregivers, as well as the number of older relatives for whom families have caregiving responsibilities. The impact of nursing home care on family caregivers’ well-being is multifaceted, with effects ranging from emotional or psychological to physical, temporal, and interpersonal. Although the psychological effects have been described as largely negative, a few studies have described the physical and temporal impact on caregivers as primarily positive.