The relationship between COVID-19 pandemic anxiety and the mothers' caregiver burden of children admitted to a selected hospital in Khorramabad

Introduction: The main purpose of the present study was to determine the relationship between the anxiety of Covid-19 pandemic and the burden of caregiving in mothers whose children were hospitalized. Methods: In this descriptive correlational research study, 162 mothers whose children were hospitalized from February to August 2022 in Shahid Madani Hospital were selected by the available sampling method. The criteria for selecting mothers were the absence of chronic illness in children, the absence of psychological problems in mothers, and a minimum education of primary school for mothers. Questionnaires containing more than five questions with no answers were excluded from the study. Two standard questionnaires, including the Corona Disease Anxiety Scale of Alipour et al. (2020) and the Care Burden Questionnaire of Novak and Gast (1989) were administered to collect data. The data were analyzed by SPSS version 16, Pearson's correlation test, and multivariate regression. A significance level of 0.05 was considered. Results: The findings illustrated that the anxiety score due to Corona in mothers was 49.12 ± 5.08 and their care burden score was 107.08 ± 7.25, which were compared with the hypothetical mean of 1.5 and 3 based on the independent t-test, respectively. Correlation coefficient between the anxiety score of Corona and the care burden of the participants based on the multiple regression test indicated a significant relationship between anxiety and care burden (r=-0.165 and p=0.036) Conclusion: The caregivers’ healthiness, whose children are suffering from Covid-19 is an important health issue that health service providers should pay serious attention to.