Mirror Neurons in Family Caregiving - 2023 12 02

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The Ethical Imperative - 2023 08 13

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  The ethical imperative to reverse the negative socio-economic impacts of family caregiving are written across the Internet in tens of thousands of anguished posts written by family caregivers in high degrees of distress and hopelessness.  Family caregivers express their feelings of disempowerment, of feeling taken advantage, of feeling taken fore granted, of how their lives have been consumed by caregiving responsibilities and they cannot see a future for themselves.  The work they do is untraceable, there is no authoritative oversight. The work they do is unaccounted, the time and energy they put into caregiving is not recognized as employment.  They find themselves in an impossible dilemma - they cannot, in good conscience, leave their family member to suffer or risk mistreatment from strangers; they also cannot, materially, financially, emotionally and mentally, sustain the level of output to family caregiving without suffering (their own health, the quality of ...
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SPOR Evidence Alliance NOTIFICATION - 2023 07 31

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  " We are thrilled to announce that your submitted health research topic,   “Cost-effectiveness of home care versus assisted living facilities for individuals requiring additional supports”   has been selected as one of the 20 priority topics for funding as a research project by the SPOR Evidence Alliance."  Canada's Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR), created by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) I submitted my health research topic last year in September 2022. At that point I was approaching my first anniversary of caregiving for my frail elder mother, who moved in with me on November 1, 2021.  Mom's birthday is November 1, 1930. She had just turned 91 when she aged out of her place in mental health group housing, where she had lived since 1982.  Throughout the summer of 2022 I had struggled with my own health and well-being as an inordinate proportion of the work of caring for Mom had fallen to me and my husband. I did not know...
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How many hours - 2024 06 12

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  We had our first assessment with Case Manager this week, to see if Mom could be registered with the Family Respite Centre. The Family Respite Centre is a facility that provides overnight long term care accommodations for up to 30 days a year so that the primary caregiver can get a significant break from caregiving duty.  The assessment process was a sit-down interview answering questions from a questionnaire. One of the questions was directed at me, and it read, "How many hours a week do you provide care to your Mom?" This question is impossible to answer because, on the one hand, a family caregiver might think they are supposed to account for hours based on time on task, with 'task' defined as actually doing hands-on work - meal prep, sweep up, dishes, laundry, floors, etc. But the work of family caregiving does not fit into this model for measurement because most of the family caregiver's time doing hands-on tasks is too short, numerous and variable to measure...
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