Spousal support, parent–nurse partnership and caregiver burden among parents of children with chronic diseases: A cross‐sectional study

Abstract

Aim

To examine the effects of spousal support and parent–nurse partnership on caregiver burden of parents of children with chronic disease.

Background

With the trend of increasing the global number of children with chronic diseases, the parental caregiver burden has become increasingly prevalent.

Design

Cross-sectional study.

Methods

The study participants included 115 parents of children diagnosed with chronic disease at a general hospital in South Korea. The study duration was 4 June 2021–30 April 2022. Self-reported measures included the parent–nurse partnership scale, the Korean version of the Parenting Alliance Inventory and the family caregiver burden scale. T-tests, ANOVA, Pearson's correlation coefficients and hierarchical linear multiple regression were conducted using IBM SPSS version 26.0. This study followed STROBE guideline.

Results

Parental caregiver burden was significantly negatively associated with spousal support and parent–nurse partnership. Factors significantly influencing caregiver burden were parental alcohol consumption; child's inherited metabolic disease, cardiovascular disease, disease relating to haematological tumours or kidney disease diagnosis; child's health perceived as poor by parents; child's dependency perceived as high by parents; hospitalization recency; and low spousal support. These factors accounted for 65% of caregiver burden.

Conclusion

Parental caregiver burden was related to spousal support and parent–nurse partnership, but the primary factor affecting caregiver burden was spousal support.

Relevance to clinical practice

The results highlighted the role of healthcare professionals in educating parents of children with chronic diseases to facilitate spousal support and have implications for nursing and community-based interventions to reduce parental caregiver burden. Furthermore, they underlined that policymakers and other stakeholders should pay attention to the parental caregiver burden through government-based, family-centered strategies.

Patient or public contribution

Parents of children with chronic disease were recruited to perform the self-administered survey in the phase of data collection.