Social support and life quality of caregivers of elderly dependents at home

The objective of this study was to identify the social support and your relationship with the life quality of caregivers of elderly dependents at home. It’s a quantitative study, exploratory and descriptive who obtained the participation of 72 caregivers of elderly dependents enrolled in basic health units from a city in the interior of Bahia. The data collect was realized by two instruments: Satisfaction with Social Support Scale (SSSS) and the Life Quality assessment tool, The World Health Organization of Quality of Life (WHOQOL BREF). The results showed a prevalence of female caregivers (88,9%), elderly sons (50,0%), that cares of the elderly for over than a year (89,6%), with other’s people support (61,1%) and with a medium social support (87,5%). Regarding the appearance of health problems in caregivers, (53,2%) related to show some injury after performing this task. Regarding the distribution of the domains of caregivers' quality of life, the highest score was for the social domain (72,33) and the less one for the environmental domain (58,91%). On the cross-tabulation of social support with the quality of life of the Whoqol-bref and Pearson's chi-square test of caregivers of the elderly, caregivers mentioned a medium social support with a lower score in the environmental domain (58,00) and a higher score for the physical domain (72,16). We can ensure that there is a median life quality of this group of elderly caregivers with environmental domain considered poor, although there is no significant significance was identified among the variables.