Nursing care and research

When a family member takes on the daily work of managing a loved one's chronic illness — coordinating medications, monitoring symptoms, and navigating care systems — they become an unpaid, often undertrained extension of the healthcare workforce, with real consequences for their own physical and psychological health. Research in this area examines how caregiver burden accumulates over time, how self-care practices either protect or deteriorate under sustained caregiving demands, and how nursing interventions can be designed to support both the person receiving care and the person providing it. As populations age and chronic illness becomes the norm rather than the exception, the stakes of getting this right are rising: health systems increasingly depend on family caregivers to fill gaps that formal care cannot. Open questions include how to identify which caregivers are at highest risk of burnout before a crisis occurs, and how health promotion programs can be tailored to reach caregivers who rarely see themselves as patients in need of care.

Works

40,564

Total citations

36,841

Keywords

Family CaregiversSelf-CareChronic IllnessQuality of LifeCaregiver BurdenNursing Interventions