Family Caregiver Investigation

  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...

  2024 10 12 - Caregiver Research - After Death Massage therapy to recover from three years of caregiving, death event and bereavement 23 paid by MSP 135 one treatment Net cost to me - 112 per treatment The $23 is supposed to be applied to the cost, and the patient pays up the difference but it seems like a ridiculous amount to administer given the impact on the cost of receiving the treatment - who is going to make a financial decision for treatment if it only offsets less than 20% of the cost per treatment?  

Mom passed away at 4:03 pm on October 4, 2024. She was 93 years old, less than one month to her 94th birthday, which would have been on November 1. On Thursday, the day before, the Palliative Nurse came to see how we were doing. My sister had been here for a couple of nights to give me respite from overseeing the 24/7 emergency long term caregiving schedule that had been implemented on Tuesday, September 24. My sister was also here on that Tuesday, when we realized we could no longer care for Mom on our own at home. Mom was too weak to hold her weight to stand up to use the commode, and I was not strong enough to hold her weight for her.  Mom had come down with a suspected stomach flu on September 4, but it is hard to tell exactly when the flu started. We had been dealing with bowel emergencies before that. We implemented the dietary protocol to deal with diahrrea and intestinal inflammation, because Mom wasn't absorbing any nutrition from any of the food she was eating.  Mom'...