Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2023 Jun;37(2):350-363.
doi: 10.1111/scs.13115. Epub 2022 Aug 17.

Informal care burden during the COVID-19 pandemic in Flanders, Belgium: The role of perceived threat, personality and resilience

David De Coninck  1 , Shauni Van Doren  2 , Koen Matthijs  1 , Anja Declercq  1   2
Affiliations

Informal care burden during the COVID-19 pandemic in Flanders, Belgium: The role of perceived threat, personality and resilience

David De Coninck et al. Scand J Caring Sci. 2023 Jun.

Abstract

Background: In this study, we investigate how socio-demographic characteristics (age, gender and education) and informal care relationship characteristics (e.g., time spent on care, number of informal caregivers, professional care) are linked with informal care burden during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we expect this burden to differ by personality characteristics, degree of resilience, and-in this specific context-perceived the COVID-19 threat.

Method: We used the fifth wave of a longitudinal study to identify 258 informal caregivers. These online survey data came from a five-wave longitudinal study in Flanders, Belgium that ran from April 2020 to April 2021. Data were representative of the adult population by age and gender. Analyses include t-tests, ANOVA, SEM and binomial logistic regression.

Results: We found that the informal care burden was strongly linked with a socio-economic gradient, time investment changes in care since the start of the pandemic, and whether there was more than one informal caregiver. Personality traits such as agreeableness and openness to experience, and the perceived threat of COVID-19 were also related to care burden.

Conclusions: During the pandemic, informal caregivers were put under extra considerable pressure: restrictive government measures sometimes led to the temporary suspension of some or all professional care for persons with care needs, which may have resulted in a growing psychosocial burden. We recommend that, in the future, the focus should be on supporting the mental wellbeing and social participation of caregivers along with measures to protect caregivers and their relatives from COVID-19. Support structures for informal caregivers should be kept running during crises now and in the future, but it is also important to adopt a case-by-case basis to consider support for informal caregivers.

Keywords: COVID-19; coronavirus; informal care; informal care burden; pandemic; perceived threat; personality; resilience.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

References

    1. Bedford J, Enria D, Giesecke J, Heymann DL, Ihekweazu C, Kobinger G, et al. COVID‐19: Towards controlling of a pandemic. Lancet. 2020;395(10229):1015–8. - PMC - PubMed
    1. WHO . WHO Virtual press conference on COVID‐19. Updated March, 2020. [cited 2022 Jan 7]. Available from: https://www.who.int/docs/default‐source/coronaviruse/transcripts/who‐aud...
    1. de Pablo GS, Vaquerizo‐Serrano J, Catalan A, et al. Impact of coronavirus syndromes on physical and mental health of health care workers: Systematic review and meta‐analysis. J Affect Disord. 2020;275:48–57. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Généreux M, Schluter PJ, Landaverde E, Hung KKC, Wong CS, Mok CPY, et al. The evolution in anxiety and depression with the progression of the pandemic in adult populations from eight countries and four continents. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021;18(9):4845. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Schwab K, Malleret T. COVID‐19: The great reset. Cork, Ireland: Forum Publishing; 2020.