Clinical Assistance, Burden and Resilience: The Role of Clinical Psychological Features in the Field of “Invisible Patients”

Background: The activities of caregiving to patients represent a fundamental activity. A consistent risk for burden is known in literature, evident to the point of configuring caregivers as "invisible patients". The resilience of caregivers is therefore a fundamental variable with regard to their well-being and quality of life. The present study was aimed at highlighting the presence of variables such as resilience and burden in caregivers, together with factors such as age, gender, education and work commitment in terms of emergence, correlation relationships and dependencies among independent and clinical variables. Methods: The Sample consisted of 126 carers aged 18-30 years. The variables considered concerned socio-demographics (age, sex, education, hours/days of speech per week and years of service) and clinical feature, as in the case of burden and resilience. Results: Through correlational analyses including sociodemographic variables and resilience, a low number of significant relations emerged. With reference to sociodemographic variables and burden, significant and positive correlations emerged for age, hours and days of work for week and years of work. On the contrary, a significant and negative correlation has emerged with respect to the education variable, confirming its protective role. Significant correlations between resilience and burden variables tended to be positive, except for perception of self and developmental burden. Multivariate linear regression analyses produced numerous dependencies between predictors identified as age, sex, education, hours/days of work for week and years of week and dependent variables related to burden and resilience. Conclusions: The study made it possible to consider fundamental socio-demographic, occupational and psychological variables in the life of caregivers. In this sense, it is possible to understand not only the existence of adverse phenomena to the quality of life of caregivers, but also important relationships between personal variables, resilience and burden risk. In this sense it is essential to use the emerged data, integrated with the data in the literature, in order to configure interventions aimed at reducing the burden of caregivers and improving their quality of life.