Rural communities

Family members of children with disabilities have become more involved in their children's care and have adopted the role of primary caregiver. Due to the varying degrees of the condition, children with cerebral palsy (CP) often require greater involvement from their caregivers. Fifteen caregivers for children with CP residing in rural communities of the Western Cape, South Africa, were interviewed to explore the barriers and facilitators that they encountered.

Objectives Describe preferred learning modalities for clinical care task assistance among general adults and family caregivers. Report differences by rural/urban residence in learning modalities for clinical care task assistance among general adults and family caregivers. Importance. Rural family caregivers for patients with serious illness receive minimal formal training but often perform clinical care tasks far from clinical settings. Evidence-based strategies to prepare caregivers for these tasks are needed. Objective(s).

Research on caregiving children tends to be limited to children's caregiving experiences of parents with a specific disease or disability. This has led to a common perception that children's caregiving is a single, uniform and often long-term experience. Whilst this is most certainly the case for many children in economically more advanced countries, this may not hold true in rural Africa, where poverty and AIDS can have significant knock-on effects on entire families and communities.