The majority of disabled persons in Taiwan are cared by their family members; these family members need to take complete responsibility towards them. People with disabilities that require long term care bring high level of burden to the family, which worsens caregivers’ mental and physical health. Thus, the aims of this study are to determine the primary caregivers’ disease conditions, medical utilization and
expenditure, and self-perceived health and quality of life, as well as to investigate the associated factors with the health of caregivers.
A case-control study was conducted by using the dataset of the 2001 Health Interview Household Survey from the National Health Research Institutes. The differences between the health status of the primary caregivers (n=207) and the general public (control group; n=828) are compared and analyzed. This study also analyzes the related factors to caregivers’ health.
After comparing primary caregivers and control groups’ health, the results showed primary caregivers’
disease conditions, medical utilization and expenditure, and self-perceived health and quality of life were worse than that of control groups. The results showed that associated factors with health conditions of the primary caregivers included caregivers’ age, religion, job status, household income and care recipient’s age, disability type, being psychosis and relationship to recipients.
This study found the primary caregivers’ health status worse than the general public. Primary caregivers are getting older and the disease conditions are severely. The household income is less, the quality of life are poorer. Primary caregivers took care of persons with congenital disability have poorer mental
component summary(MCS), while caregivers took care of persons with senile disability have poorer physical component summary(PCS). The spouse caregivers are more disease conditions and the mental health of the parent caregivers are poor. The different characteristics of primary caregivers might have different level of health status, which suggests that health authorities could provide health education and support service according to the characteristic of caregivers.
