Project 467246

Family caregivers play an important role in the care and support of patients. In fact, they are in a unique position to relieve much of the responsibility from the notoriously burdened medical system. However, this responsibility does not come without a cost. One in three caregivers report experiencing distress related to their role (Bining et al., 2021).Caregivers for patients with cancer are among the most burdened, due to their added physical, psychosocial and emotional stress. This comes from the challenges related to performing complicated tasks such as medication administration, wound care, and managing cancer-treatment related symptoms such as nausea, fatigue, and pain (Lambert et al., 2019).Distress experienced by caregivers has been shown to cause physical symptoms such as sleep and immune function disturbances (Lambert et al., 2017). In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, this burden has increased, therefore, more research being allocated to understanding the support informal caregivers provide to oncology patients (Park, 2021). What research currently lacks is a thorough evaluation of how family caregiver distress impacts on their burden in psychosocial oncology. This study seeks to describe distress among caregivers and its impact on burden as reported by family caregivers. This research will focus on developing a deeper understanding of caregiver burden so that appropriate support services can be mobilized to help deal with these challenges, hopefully to minimize burden and distress.