Abstract
D.Cur. (Psychiatric Nursing)
The year 1978, marked an important development of mental health services in Botswana, where the government made strides to de-institutionalise mental health care and relegate it to primary health care setting (Ben-Tovim, 1983:109-110). This was done with a view to bring mental health services to the people. The focus towards community care lead to increase in family caregiving responsibility. While the focus is on the patient, the nearly invisible population waits in the wings, the people who provide care to the patients at home. The movement of community based care implicitly but deniably pulled the relatives of persons living with mental illness into the critical stage of caregiving.
Caring for persons living with mental illness is often described as challenging and difficult. This shift in treatment philosophy had a profound, but rarely acknowledged effect on the family. Caregiving evoked feelings of frustrations and powerlessness, thus leading to need for support. Despite the many studies on caregivers’ experiences of caring for persons living with mental illness conducted, there has not been any known meta-synthesis of the studies done in Africa. Until now the findings remain isolated. At present there has not been any psycho-educational programme conducted for the family caregivers of persons living with mental illness, and yet the expectation is that family caregivers be able to cope with caregiving. As such the purpose of this research was to conduct a meta-synthesis on phenomenological studies on family caregivers’ lived experiences and to identify common themes in the conducted research. This served as a basis for the development of a psycho-educational programme to facilitate effective coping with caregiving of family caregivers caring for persons living with mental illness.
The overall objective was to develop, implement and evaluate a psycho-educational programme and to assist family members to effectively cope with caregiving of persons living with mental illness in the home setting in Botswana. In order to achieve the research aim a qualitative meta-synthesis design (Bondas & Hall, 2007:114) which is exploratory, descriptive, interpretive, analytic, reflective and contextual in nature was utilized. The research took place in four steps. Step one...