Investigating the effects of post-discharge care services for patients with severe psychiatric illnesses on their caregivers' burnout in Sanandaj

Family-based caregivers of psychiatric patients are the backbone of the healthcare system and are, in fact, generally considered as patients themselves. Their commitment and obligation to take care of the in-need and disabled patients in the family can lead to their psychological destruction. This paper attempts to investigate the effects of post-discharge care for patients with severe psychiatric illnesses on the burnout of their caregivers in the Qods Hospital of Sanandaj. This before-after study was performed on 72 subjects divided into two groups of 36, all of whom were chosen from the caregivers of the case and control subjects from family members of the psychiatric patients discharged from Qods psychiatric hospital in 2016. The study was effectively conducted with a control group design. The case group included patients who received home-care services after being discharged, and the caregiver group received nothing but regular care. First, using the hospital files, personal characteristics and diagnosis of the patient were recorded, thus the caregivers' characteristics and their burnout and psychological exhaustion severity were collected by caregiver burden inventory. The data were presented using descriptive-analytic indexes. The results represented that most of the caregivers (95.8%) suffered from moderate to severe burdens at the time of discharge. In using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, pre-test scores in two groups supported the normal hypotheses of the data (P = 0.55). Also, the level of significance in the covariance test showed the efficacy of intervention after the test (P = 0.000). In this study, most of the patients' caregivers with severe mental illnesses suffered from moderate to a severe burden, which, of course, seems to be more than other similar studies. Differences in social, cultural, and special regional conditions, as well as the type of applied questionnaire, were of significance. However, despite the mentioned difference, as it is true for other similar studies in Iran and other countries, home-care services have a significant effect on reducing the caregivers' burden after one year. Researches could, besides reducing the burnout of caregivers, provide a model which could help patients in the deprived areas without removing cultural and family roots and without diminishing the role of the family.