Managing Chronic Illness in the Family: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Having a family member with a chronic illness affects relationships, roles, hierar-chies, and the family system in general, and challenges the family to manage and adapt to the new circumstances. The pur-pose of this review of the research literat-ure is to identify the issues that the family faces in managing a member's chronic illness. For this purpose, a systematic review was conducted to review articles public- of Library, and studies were selected and reviewed. The results showed that thestudies enumerated the specific issues of chronic illness manage-ment in the family, in the form of several topics, which are: motivation of family members in patient care, the effects of the illness on the family, family needs in the face of chronic illness and how to cope with chronic illness. Awareness of these issues will help professionals provide support and design appropriate interve-ntions for these families and guide future research.