Caregiver Burnout

ABSTRACT

As the number of HIV/AIDS cases is still increasing, there is always a need for trained and professional caregivers. There is a wide range of clinical challenges that caregivers have to face with the changing face of the disease. But who looks after the caregivers? Their needs are not being addressed as seriously as they need to be. Thus, Stress and Burnout issues are common among them and this is also impacting the quality of caregiving. Burnout is a process and not a sudden event and so its identification at an early stage is important. It is high time that this issue should get its due importance and care of caregivers be taken up more actively and effectively. Professionals like doctors, nurses, social workers, counselors invest

With its high demand and extensive burn out concerns, the severity and intensity of caregiving for HIV would be overwhelming, leaving many of nurses working with HIV patients with hopelessness and despair. The extent to which the severity of life-threatening ailments of patients and their demands of fulfilling health care requirements affect the psychological well-being of nursing professionals has been a major concern. This study explores and describes the experiences, feelings, and perceptions of nurses working with HIV patients as caregivers working with HIV/AIDS. A qualitative study along with questionnaires investigating 100 caregivers involving stress factors involved in HIV/AIDS-related care, symptoms of occupational stress for caregivers. The results specify in what sense these caregivers find their work extremely

Occupational Stress is defined as, “the psychological state that is or represents an imbalance or mismatch between people’s perceptions of the demands on them (relevant to work) and their ability to cope with those demands” (Miller 2000). It is an individual based, affect overloaded experience associated with stressors that are perceived and interpreted subjectively and uniquely by everyone. Stress in HIV/AIDS care can be caused due to a variety of factors like client overload, demands of the caregiving activities ranging from physical and personal care of the clients to around the clock monitoring and care of the severely ill, daily domestic chores of the caregiver’s own household, fear and uncertainty about HIV contagion and their own health, strong feelings of guilt, anger and helplessness etc. Insufficient compensation and encouragement are also leading factors for stress. Whereas, burnout is the exhaustion of physical or emotional strength because of prolonged stress or frustration which has been detected in a wide variety of health care providers. Burnout has, in fact, understood to be an individual stress experience that is embedded in a context of social relationships, and thus involves the person’s conception of both the self and the