Research Articles (DNS)

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Browsing Research Articles (DNS) by Subject "Coping"

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    Empowerment of the rural parents/caregivers of children with heart diseases in Namibia to facilitate coping with the demands of caring at home
    (2013) Amakali, Kristofina; Small, Louis F.
    Aim: The purpose of this study was to describe how the parents/caregivers of children with heart diseases cope with the demands of caring for these children at home, with the purpose to develop a home-based health care programme to facilitate the parents/caregivers’ coping with the demands of care. Methods: A qualitative, exploratory, descriptive, and contextual study was conducted. Phenomenological data on the lived experiences of coping with the demands to care by the parents/caregivers and of living with the burden of the disease by the children were gathered and interpreted from a purposefully selected sample of 5 multiple cases of parents/caregivers and children with heart disease from the rural areas. Results: The findings have revealed poor coping with the demands of caring among the parents/caregivers, as characterized by the experiences of emotional challenges, disruptive social functioning and social relations, lack of support from the family and societal organizations, financial difficulties and of course the experiences of decreased vitality by the children. As a result, the need to empower the parents/caregivers for them to cope with providing a continuum care to their children who have heart disease was identified. The dynamics to mitigate the negative experiences were conceptualized. Therefore, the interventions of a home-based health care programme as an interface to facilitate the parents/caregivers to cope with the challenges caused by the demands to care were developed. Conclusions: The need for empowerment of these parents/caregivers can be met through the implementation of multi-component interventions, which draw together all the possible determinants factors and the coping methods to facilitate coping.
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    A support programme for caregivers of children with heart disease in rural Namibia
    (2014) Amakali, Kristofina; Small, Louis F.
    The majority of children suffering from heart disease in Namibia receive treatment as outpatients, with their caregivers taking responsibility for their continuing care. To provide the care required by these children, the caregiver has to remain vigilant. Many of these children live in rural areas and their caregivers may have only a limited educational background, as well as limited financial resources, as they depend on subsistence agriculture for a living. The development of the support programme discussed in this article originated from the results of a qualitative, exploratory, phenomenological study that addressed the issue of how these caregivers managed this responsibility. The findings of this study revealed that the caregivers generally had poor coping experiences. Subsequently, these findings formed the basis for the proposal about a support programme for the rural caregivers of children with heart disease in Namibia. As part of the study, interventions for home-based health care were developed, implemented and evaluated in order to facilitate the caregiver’s coping with the demands of home care. The findings of an outcomes evaluation indicated that the caregivers’ knowledge of the child’s condition, as well as the skills for providing care at home and the information about community-based resources that could provide them with support to cope, increased. If the programme were to be extended to other families in similar contexts, the programme interventions could make a difference in terms of their coping with the demands of care. This paper describes the implementation process involved in a home-based health care programme intervention of the study, and the subsequent outcomes of the programme evaluation.