Sociodemographic Profile, Health Conditions, and Burden of Informal Caregivers of Older Adults in Brazil During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-Sectional, Exploratory, Noninterventional, Descriptive Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Demographic changes in the world population have resulted in an increasingly aging society, with a progressive increase in the number of people in situations of dependence, who require assistance from family members to meet their basic needs. Caring for older adults involves performing diverse activities, resulting in reduced free time and tiredness, and fulfilling the demands and expectations related to personal, family, physical, and social life, consequently compromising the quality of life of the caregiver. In this context, the informal caregiver of hospitalized older adults emerges as the focus of attention. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to describe the sociodemographic profile, health conditions, and burden of informal caregivers of older adults admitted to a university hospital in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic period. METHODS: This is a cross-sectional, descriptive, and analytical study that was conducted with 25 informal caregivers of hospitalized older adults in a university hospital in Brazil between August and September 2022. Three instruments were applied: Caregiver Burden Inventory, sociodemographic questionnaire, and health conditions questionnaire. The data were analyzed using SPSS version 28.0. Descriptive (frequency and percentage) and inferential analyses were performed using 2-sided Student t test with 95% CIs. RESULTS: Of the 25 interviewees, 18 (72%) were females, 17 (46%) were married or in a stable union, 14 (56%) completed secondary education, and 11 (44%) lived with the older adults who needed care. The average age of the participants was 44 (SD 12.8) years. Regarding their health conditions, most caregivers self-reported it as good (12/25, 48%). They provided care to their father or mother older than 70 years (14/25, 56%). The Caregiver Burden Inventory analysis showed that the caregivers were the most negatively impacted in the domains of personal life overload (mean 10.8, SD 3.46; P=.047) and physical overload (mean 10.6, SD 2.32; P=.02). CONCLUSIONS: In recent years, there has been an increase in the burden on informal caregivers of hospitalized older adults in Brazil, thereby impacting their personal and physical lives. The findings of our study show that health care professionals should be trained to promote health guidelines and actions to improve the personal and physical lives of the caregiver population in Brazil.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".