Assessment of Knowledge and Practices Regarding Elderly Care among Elderly Care Givers at Geriatric Homes

Background: Elderly mainly need to caregivers who should have the chance to perform their practices toward their elderly by professional. Aim: to assess knowledge and practices regarding elderly care among elderly care givers at geriatric homes. Design: descriptive study design. Setting: In geriatric homes at Cairo governorate. Sample: A convenient sample included 60 of elderly caregivers working in the previous mentioned settings. Tool: two tools were used; interview questionnaire form (Appendix I): the questionnaire sheet was designed by the researcher and written in simple Arabic language based on scientific literature review and experts' opinion. It is comprised of two parts. Part I; It was used to assess demographic characteristics of elderly caregivers. Part II; It was used to assess knowledge about elderly care. Observational checklist to assess caregivers’ practices by researcher (Appendix II):it was adopted from Saskatchewan Ministry of Health Home Care Policy Manual (2021) and Rice (1999). The checklist was used to meet the needs of elderly caregivers. Results: show that 71.7% elderly caregivers regarded to gender were female. There were highly statistically significant difference and very highly statistically significant differences between total knowledge and total practices at P-value was (p < 0.01**) and (p < 0.001***) respectively. Conclusion: two fifths of studied sample age was ranged from 41 to less than 50 years old with the mean age was 38.53 ± 9.79. Majority of study sample were females than males, who were in common married. More than half of them were poor in total knowledge about elderly care at geriatric homes. For the total practices of the elderly caregivers toward elderly care at geriatric home, three quarters of the elderly caregivers were not competent. There was a positive correlation between knowledge score with practice score when r = 0.856. Recommendation: Encourage multidisciplinary researches in the same study in order to cover large group of elderly caregivers in different places and effectively address the issue of caregiver´s burden during caring for elderly with chronic illness and problematic behavior.