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. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.