Research Objective and Arguments - 2023 08 13

 

The objective of this research initiative is to reverse the persistent issue of family caregiver's negative socio-economic impacts as a result of taking on the responsibility to provide caregiving infrastructure to a family member or friend who cannot fend for themselves. The negative impacts are well-documented. The risks to family caregiver well-being are being addressed, but there is a critical gap in the approach to improving family caregiver health and well-being. This critical gap is the problem of conceiving family caregiving as an individual undertaking and attempting to support individual family caregivers on a case by case basis instead of taking a comprehensive look at family caregiving as a system and addressing the deficiencies in system integrity across all caregiving family households.

The four arguments map onto the four stages of research proposed in the Research Overview.

These four arguments look at family caregiving from four different perspectives.

Argument 1 looks at the issue of a lack of research information available to provide evidence-based data to support healthcare legislation and policy with regards to utilizing private family caregiving as an integral part of institutional healthcare planning.

Argument 2 looks at the issue of creating a meaningful data structure between institutional caregiving and family caregiving to be able to properly analyze production workflows and the flow of resources to support that work so that family caregiving infrastructure is sustained over time.

Argument 3 looks at the issue of a lack of specific data to quantify the work provided in family caregiving settings. In this useage, 'work' is referring to all the dimensions of caregiving infrastructure provided in family settings and funded by private family resources.

Argument 4 looks at the issue of isolation and disempowerment in family caregiving because there is no family caregiving system to provide a coherent organizational entity to work on behalf of improving family caregiver socio-economic outcomes.

The research objective of reversing negative socio-economic health impacts of family caregiving requires attention in all four of these issues - 1. lack of research information; 2. lack of integrated data structure to synchronous operational workflows between institutional and family caregiving settings; 3. lack of quantified data providing a comprehensive picture of work responsibilities, operational workflows, and work results in family caregiving settings; 4. lack of a coherent, cohesive, systemic approach to organizing and supporting family caregivers as they carry out their caregiving responsibilities.

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