Quality of Life among Caregivers of Children with Disabilities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Caregivers provide different types of care, such as physical care, transfers, and follow-ups with doctors and rehabilitation professionals. All these types of care impact the caregivers’ quality of life (QOL). Due to a lack of collective evidence on the QOL of caregivers having children with disabilities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, we conducted this review to find the QOL of caregivers of children with disabilities. A thorough literature search was performed using an electronic database and a gray literature search to obtain relevant articles. These two distinct literature searches found a total of 233 studies. Out of these, 12 studies were on the QOL of caregivers with children with disabilities in Saudi Arabia. The methodological quality assessment of all 12 studies was done by using the quality assessment tool for observational cohort and cross-sectional studies. We established that caregivers of children with disabilities had a reduced QOL in the physical, psychological, and social relation domains. Factors such as gender, age, and low income impact the QOL among caregivers of children with disabilities.