Self-care in chronic diseases. The patient-caregiver dyad in the Albanian reality

Abstract

Multiple chronic diseases mostly affect people over 65 years old, when age-related changes, complicated by physical, cognitive, and emotional problems accelerate functional decline. This increases the elderly population to a high risk of deterioration of their health condition and predisposes to various chronic diseases. Objective: Patient self-care and the caregiver’s contribution to patient self-care is the main purpose of this study. Observation of the patient to reduce the burden of the disease and obtain better results for their life. Methods: Is a multicenter transversal study at zero time, the study provides for the administration of a validated questionnaire in the Albanian language and addressed to a sample of 30 patient-caregiver dyads in the Albanian population, using specific tools to evaluate the management of the chronic pathology and the patient’s self-care skills and the caregiver care framework. Results: Patients were mainly male (53%) with an average age of 74 years. The average reported selfcare for maintenance score was 57.63, for monitoring the score was 55.00 and for management was 59.11. For the caregivers the most prevalent subjects were female (60%) with an average age of 60 years old. The average reported score for the contribution of caregivers at selfcare maintenance was 47.08, at selfcare monitoring was 55.00 and at selfcare management was 59.00. Discussion: This study seeks to determine self-care maintenance, monitoring, management, and confidence by including sociodemographic and clinical variables to assess care outcomes in dyads in the context of multiple chronic conditions. Keywords: chronic illness, chronic disease, nursing care, self-care.