Family Caregiver System - Research Overview - 2023 08 13

 

It is time to elevate our concepts of family caregiving from individual, private family-based caregiving to see it as an integral, critical part of our overall healthcare system.

To elevate our concept of family caregiving to a systemic perspective, we need to understand how each individual family caregiving setting is actually part of a systemic whole. We need to acknowledge the individuality of each family caregiving setting, and we also need to learn how each family caregiving setting shares operational realities that can be generalized across households. This means that we take into account the many variations of individual family caregiving that are unique for every family, and we don't let that get in the way of formulating a systemic response to the issues shared across households.

The collective impact of negative socio-economic vulnerabilities need to be addressed as a systems issue, not an issue of individual, isolated families and households.

This research overview moves through four stages that transform a failing, individuated, fragmented burden of care to a robust, collective, comprehensive response to our social needs to provide care for our citizens who cannot fend for themselves.

The stages are designed to work both sequentially and concurrently. The first stage would be completed through the health topic research done under the authority of the Evidence Alliance. The second, third and fourth stages would be completed under the authority of an institutional partner interested in extending the work after the Evidence Alliance stage is concluded.

Three imperatives have been identified that need further investigation to understand what it means to integrate family caregiving into the existing healthcare system. These three imperatives are: 1. Ethical imperative: family caregivers are suffering and eventually failing in their mission to keep their family member at home; 2. Systems imperative: family caregiving is providing critical infrastructure to the healthcare system, when family caregivers fail, the overall healthcare system is at risk of failure; 3. Economic imperative: there is no quantified valuation of family caregiving that is traceable and accountable to support legislation and policy initiatives to move caregiving into family homes, this lack of economic validation puts our entire healthcare system at risk.