Family Caregivers Need Social Scientists - 2023 08 15

 

In the month of April the primary caregiver provided 531.75 hours of caregiving time, 74% of the overall time needed to look after Mom. 

This is a family caregiving setting. This is the work being done by the family to take care of their Frail Elder (FE). The primary caregiver is the second eldest daughter. She moved her mother home into the basement suite of her house, and moved into the guest bedroom to provide live-in care at home.

This is the work being performed by a family as part of the overall healthcare system, essentially their family caregiving contribution is a sub-system of the main institutional healthcare system.

This is a significant amount of work and there are no health and safety, worksafe, or labour laws that govern the situation that the caregiving family is managing and operating.

At present, the work of family caregiving is virtually untraceable and unaccounted. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lived Experience - 2024 10 28

Image
  Yesterday I attended a meeting of our local community group, 'Age Against the Machine'. The purpose of this group is to build family, friend, neighbourhood and community resilience to support each other when we can no longer fend for ourselves. I shared what I have learned these past three years of operating a palliative care, then a long term-care, and then a hospice care bed in my home so that our Mom could spend her final years and days at home with her family. The absence of cost accountability for family caregiving in legislative, policy and institutional strategy is alarming. It places an unaccounted burden of care on families who strive to make up the functional difference between what their family member can do for themselves and what they can no longer manage. The work of family caregiving has remained invisible to research priorities, and health provider initiatives that implement patient care programs such as, "Hospital to Home", "Early Discharge...
Read more

Family Caregiving Time Summary year ending 2023 - 2024 01 17

Image
  As I work to understand the impact of family caregiving on my family and my household, I have divided the cost into to two categories: Time and Material. Time refers to the cost of time providing caregiving service to my mother, the amount of time we are spending to look after her. Material refers to the non-time tangible costs, these include property cost, lost wage earning, and other lost revenue cost, as well as other tangible expenditures resulting from providing a fully serviced family caregiving bed to the healthcare system. In 2023 my family caregiving service was responsible for 8761 hours of caregiving for my Mom (1 extra hour to account for daylight savings). We were 100% responsible for staffing Mom's home-based living space. This included a requirement to have someone sleeping over with Mom every night. My caregiving time on duty for the year totalled 6,127 hours, or 70% of the overall amount of caregiving time required. This averaged to 511 hours a month. The rest of...
Read more

Family caregiving - 24 hours of care - Jan 2024 - 2024 01 29

Image
  This is what it looks like for our family to provide 24/7 caregiving for our frail elder Mom for the month of January, 2024.  Mom enjoys having her children and grandchildren taking care of her. It gives her a lift to spend time with her family. She loves all her children and their offspring. It gives her life meaning to be with family during this final phase of her life. This schedule breaks down a caregiving staffing schedule for 7 people, including the primary caregiver. The schedule also breaks down to 91 caregiving shifts, or an average of 3 caregiving transitions each day. Of course, some days are 24 hours, other days have 4 or even 5 shift changes. In addition to the family caregiving schedule, there is also the schedule of Home Support caregivers, who come 6 days a week to provide personal care (4 days per week) and shower/shampoo (2 days per week). In the month of January there were 26 days of Home Support caregiving visits - so add 26 transitions to the 91 shift ch...
Read more