Objective  To examine caring behaviors and their influencing factors among main family caregivers of bedridden inpatients and to provide evidences for improving caring behaviors of main family caregivers and decreasing the incidence of pressure sore among bedridden inpatients.

  Methods  We conducted a face-to-face questionnaire survey among 338 main family caregivers of bedridden inpatients recruited with convenient sampling from October 2016 to February 2017. Pressure Sore Care Cognition Scale, Pressure Sore Care Behavior Scale, Zarit Caregiver Burden Scale-Chinese Version, and self-designed questionnaires on information about demography of the caregivers and clinical conditions of the inpatients were used in the survey.

  Results  For all the main family caregivers, the average total caring behavior score was 37.20 ± 4.79, with the lowest average domain scores for cares of turning over in bed and wound nursing (1.61 and 1.88) and the highest for skin nursing (1.95). Univariate analyses demonstrated that care behaviors of the caregivers differed significantly by the caregiver′s kinship with the inpatient, age, gender, economic status, care experience, and care burden. Multivariate stepwise regression analyses revealed that a caregiver′s perceived cognition on pressure sore susceptibility (β = 0.784, β ′ = 0.139), age (β = 2.645, β ′ = 0.187), gender (β = – 1.754, β ′ = – 0.175), whether having care experience (β = – 3.727, β ′ = – 0.325), bedridden time of inpatients (β = – 0.923, β ′ = – 0.133), care burden for the caregiver (β = 0.093, β ′ = 0.278) were major influencing factors of care behaviors among the caregivers and those factors could explain 27.3% of total variance of care behaviors.

  Conclusion  There are some misunderstandings and deficiencies in caring behaviors of main family caregivers of bedridden inpatients. The results indicate that targeted education on pressure sore susceptibility of bedridden inpatients should be promoted among caregivers to improve caregivers′ care behavior and decrease pressure sore incidence among the inpatients.