Caregiving a cancer patient is a complex role that involves new responsibilities for which caregivers don’t feel ready to provide care. Caregivers who feel unprepared for giving care have physical, psychological and social problems. It is necessary to determine all the needs of caregivers.

This is cross-sectional descriptive study was carried out with 203 Turkish cancer family caregivers at the oncology wards of six hospital from January-March 2019. We defined a caregiver as one of the family members who give most assistance. Data were collected with “Preparedness Scale of the Family Care Inventory”. The scale consists of eight items, total score range is 0-32. Higher scores indicate that the caregiver feels more prepared for their role. Data were evaluated by independent groups t test, one-way analysis of variance test.

The mean age of the caregivers was 46.8±13.8; most of them were female (64.5%); 68% of them felt constantly tired during the caregiving period; 55% had a decrease in social relations. Seventy one percent of the caregivers expressed that they wanted to know about the practices to protect their patients from infection; 64% of them wanted to know about what to do in case of emergency. Caregivers’ mean score from the scale was 27.0±6.0. Preparedness scores of those with high socioeconomic status are higher than those with low socioeconomic status (F = 4.047; p = 0.001). Less than one-year caregivers are more ready to provide care than caregivers for between one-five years; and between six-ten years caregivers are more ready to provide care than between one-five years (F = 6.464; p = 0.002).

Meeting caregiving needs is associated with high socioeconomic status. It is expected result that high socioeconomic status is related to preparedness for caregiving. Less than one-year caregivers encounter less problems. Nurses need to recognize that ’new’ cancer caregivers may be feeling difficulty when the problem is encountered. Caregivers with more experience duration develop the ability to solve care problems as the time to care for cancer patients increases. Nurses need to recognize that caregivers often are ’experienced’ caregivers may be feeling burnout and ignore their own health-related problems.