title: Care dependency among school-aged children: literature review.
abstract: Many disabilities and chronic illnesses of children result in those children being dependent on their caregivers. The higher dependence of children in their daily tasks undoubtedly places a greater burden on their caregivers and on care-providers in the health-care system, especially nurses. The objectives were to gain an overview of the literature dealing with care dependency among children and the factors possibly influencing their dependency on care, and to obtain instruments for measuring children's care dependency. MEDLINE, CINAHL, and PsychINFO were searched for different publications from 1995 to 2005. The literature reveals four categories of factors associated with care dependency of the child. With respect to instruments, a variety of instruments were identified but most of them were restricted to children with specific health conditions. For this reason, the paper suggests the development of a new instrument for assessing children's care dependency that is applicable to healthy children.
authors.affiliation: Department of Nursing Science, Center for Humanities and Health Sciences, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany. hannan.tork@charite.de
authors.forename: Hanan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Tork
authors.forename: Christa
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lohrmann
authors.forename: Theo
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Dassen
mesh_terms: D000203:Activities of Daily Living; D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior; D002908:Chronic Disease / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000517:prevention & control*; D003142:Communication; D017281:Cost of Illness; D003858:Dependency, Psychological; D019988:Children with Disabilities / Q000534:rehabilitation* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015438:Health Behavior; D006801:Humans; D020380:Needs Assessment / Q000458:organization & administration*; D024802:Nurse's Role; D009730:Nursing Assessment / Q000458:organization & administration*; D015403:Nursing Evaluation Research; D010347:Patient Care Planning; D010353:Patient Education as Topic; D010371:Pediatric Nursing; D011594:Psychometrics; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D012107:Research Design; D012648:Self Care