Interpersonal influences between the care provider's burnout and the older care recipient's quality of life

Abstract

Conditions of older care recipients and their care providers are supposed to affect each other, in light of a dialectical perspective. A possibility is the reciprocal influences between a care recipient's quality of life and his or her care provider's burnout. A study of the possibility surveyed 232 Hong Kong Chinese older care recipients, their professional care providers, and primary informal caregivers twice in two consecutive years. Results showed that the professional's earlier burnout, but not the informal caregiver's earlier burnout, had a negative effect on the elder's quality of life later. Furthermore, the influence of the professionals' burnout partly relied on the mediation of professional encouragement for the elder's community participation. The elder's earlier quality of life (i.e., low physical dependence) also manifested a negative effect on the professional's later burnout but not on the informal caregiver's later burnout. These results suggest that interpersonal influence springs from the older care recipient on the professional care provider, but not on the informal caregiver.