@article{article_393536, title={Frequency and Affecting Factors of Psychiatric Symptoms of Caregivers of Elderly People}, journal={Kafkas Journal of Medical Sciences}, pages={105–108}, year={2012}, author={Çatak, Binali and Öner, Can and Kılınç, Ahmet Selçuk and Sütlü, Sevinç and Şenbayram, Sırrı}, keywords={Ruhsal belirti, yaşlı, evde bakım, bakım veren}, abstract={AIM: To determine the frequency and the affecting factors of the psychiatric symptoms in the caregivers of elderly patients. METHODS: The population of this cross sectional study includes caregivers of 169 elderly patients receiving informal home care services. A sample was not chosen as we tried to reach the entire study population. Data was collected via a questionnaire after a verbal informed consent. The questionnaire includes care givers’ sociodemographical features, information regarding the care received by the patients, and the caregiver’s health and General Health Questionaire-12 (GHQ-12) developed by Goldberg. For the evaluation of GHQ-12, Likert type scoring was used. GHQ-12 scores range between 0-36 and cut-off point is accepted as 10/11. All data was analyzed in SPSS 10.5 software. RESULTS: The frequency of psychiatric symptoms in caregivers was 59.2%. Univariate analysis showed a significant relationship among the caregivers’ age, working status, education, house income supplier count, household count, insufficiency of care, and the time spared for care (p < 0.05). On the other hand, in multivariate analysis only insufficiency of care and count of income suppliers below 2 were determined as risk factors. CONCLUSION: Caregivers of elderly patients are at high risk for psychiatric disorders. Therefore, all informal caregivers should be surveyed for psychiatric disorders.}, number={3}, publisher={Kafkas Üniversitesi}