Caring for Frail Elders at Home - 2023 11 13

 



Many of us have, or are, or will, face the question - should we bring our frail elder home instead of putting them in long term care?

One of the realities of this decision is that your private family home will now be put into service as an unaccounted part of the healthcare system. You will be joining millions of family homes that are providing unfunded infrastructure to the healthcare system. What does this reality entail?

First and foremost, you will now be responsible for overseeing and/or operating a 24/7 healthcare facility which means you will be actively managing over 700 hours of caregiving time every month (30 day month = 720 hours; 31 day month = 744 hours). Whether you cover this time yourself, with unpaid family and friends, paid professional, or limited service support from your local health authority, you will be responsible for the quality and level of care provided to your frail elder.

How will you incorporate this additional role and responsibility to your existing life? How will you fund the extra time and effort that is going to impact your employment or self-employment income? What is the current condition of your relationship with your frail elder? Is there a history of abuse, abandonment, neglect, substance abuse, alcoholism, personality disorder, mental health issues? What is your personal experience with nursing, caregiving, parenting?

These are very early and obvious questions to explore as you consider your way forward with your frail elder. There are as many questions as there are individual family caregiving settings. How do we create traceable, accountable and reliable structures and systems to care for the family caregivers who are caring for frail elders at home?

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