Introduction:

Demographic transition and population aging are phenomenons that provoke the increase in the number of care-dependent elderlies, accompanied by informal caregivers with no knowledge about basic geriatric care in the community.

Objective:

To demonstrate the effectiveness of an educational intervention about the level of knowledge of informal caregivers of elderlies.

Methods:

Quasi-experimental study of educational intervention carried out at José Martí Pérez Polyclinic, in Santiago de Cuba, in the period from July to December 2018. The study population consisted of 25 informal caregivers. Developed in three stages (assessment of the level of knowledge of geriatric care before and after the intervention, knowledge was classified as adequate and inadequate; intervention and evaluation). Descriptive analysis of the information was performed, which included absolute frequencies and percentages for qualitative variables; means, medians and standard deviations with confidence intervals (95% for quantitative variables). To study the effectiveness of the intervention, the results were compared using McNemar’s test.

Results:

100% were caregivers, housewives, with a predominance of the age group between 46-55 years of age (48.00%). Knowledge about geriatric care, before the intervention, was inadequate in 76.00% and, after the intervention, in 28.00%, with a 95% reliability level, with the application of McNemar’s probability test (p<0.05).

Conclusions:

The educational intervention was effective in improving the level of knowledge of informal caregivers about basic geriatric care in the elderly in need.

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