Introduction: Long-term care is a type of service, with special nurses and lay caregivers helping people, mostly the elderly and disabled, who are dependent on activitiesof daily living and instrumentalactivities of daily living. The need for long-term care is increasing every year, which causes more pressure and a greater burden on lay care, which is so crucial in the day-to-day patient care. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to determine how nurses with various activities can influence the performance of lay caregivers in their care of people in the home environment who need help with basic and supportive daily tasks. Methods: A descriptive method of work was used, and a review of domestic and foreign professional literature from the CINAHL and MEDLINE databases in the period from September to December 2021. The age literature is limited to the period from 2008 to 2021. Search string used: »nurse, nurses or nursing« AND »long-term care« AND »support or supporting or help or guidance or aid or assistance or empowerment« AND »informal caregiver or family caregiver or informal carer or family carer or lay caregiver«. Results: Research shows that nurses are key to supporting lay caregivers, who repeatedly point out that they would like more supervision and advice from nurses, more knowledge about disease stages, help with coping with stress, and more communication skills. Their unmet needs can also have an impact on the quality of their care, leading to poorer health outcomes. Discussion and conclusion: Lay caregivers do not have enough time, knowledge and support to be able to do such hard work as care with confidence, so it is very important that nurses recognize their needs and support them in areas where it is needed. Their common goal is to try to keep patients in their home environment for as long as possible, provided that their lives are still safe and of good quality. They can only achieve this with good relationships and communication.
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