The AARP Public Policy Institute (PPI) and the United Hospital Fund (UHF) released a report that finds 46 percent of family caregivers perform medical tasks. The report, “Home Alone: Family Caregivers Providing Complex Chronic Care,” explores the level of difficulty of the tasks that caregivers perform and challenges the common perception of family caregiving as something that most adults can easily master. [1]
“We know that family caregivers provide help with activities such as bathing and dressing, shopping, cooking and preparing meals. We also ask caregivers to do things that would make even nursing students tremble; it’s important that we understand the scope of this new normal,” said Susan Reinhard, Senior Vice President and Director of the AARP Public Policy Institute. “As hospitals discharge patients quicker and sicker, we’re finding that family caregivers are responsible for medical and nursing care including medication management and wound care.”
The PPI and UHF report is based on a survey of 1,677 family caregivers who were asked about the specific tasks they perform. There are more than 42 million unpaid family caregivers in the United States and more than a third of these caregivers reported doing wound care.
“The family caregivers in our survey reported that their chronically ill family members were in and out of hospitals and emergency departments. Despite frequent encounters with the acute care system, family caregivers were not prepared for the medical and nursing tasks they were expected to provide at home,” added Carol Levine, Director of Families and Health Care Project for United Hospital Fund. “We asked family caregivers how they learned to manage their family members’ medications, for example, and 61 percent said, ‘I learned on my own.’ Clearly, professionals need to do a better job of training family caregivers.”
Forty percent of the caregivers surveyed reported feeling worried about making a mistake. Because these tasks are becoming more frequent, the report recommends actions including: ensuring that caregivers are well trained and including the caregivers’ needs in the new models of care.
[1] AARP. “Medication management, wound care part of new normal for caregivers.” Web. October 1 2012.
I agree not all seniors need to or solhud be in a home. It’s a very difficult choice at best assisted living facility, nursing home, SNF, with family, or?? My brothers and I struggled with it long and hard before deciding an assisted living facility was best in our case. The sad part for me, aside from mom’s condition and dementia, was seeing the other residents and how nobody came to visit them. It was as if they were being warehoused. I was close by and saw Mom a lot, and that made it better: I felt comfortable about her being there, she knew I was there, I saw what was going on and got to know the workers, and I talked to her gerontologist a lot.I like the idea of alert systems, and my parents had one, it’s that I worry they may provide a false sense of security in some cases. My mom and dad didn’t use it the way it was designed and because of that it was relatively ineffective. I worry caregivers and family will let the device do the work . I worry the alarm companies over promise and under deliver. I’m sure there are many stories of them saving lives and I’m glad for them.Thank you for your comment!!!Kirk
Yes, this is a difficult decision for families and caregivers. We appreciate your comment.
While I was in law school, i learned to operate my late husband’s dialysis machine in our home. I went to a hospital three nights a week for ten weeks for training. This has been common for over thirty years. Only later did i learn that some nurses won’t go near a dialysis machine, and i was forty miles out in a wooded suburb dialyzing a patient with congestive heart failure! Ignorance is bliss. Over nine years, I managed transplant rejection with massive infections, cardiac arrythmias, post surgical care, and at one point, hallucinations and ICU induced PTSD. Oddly enough, i never had to manage wound care because my husband was very stoic and kept himself up and walking. I have a relative now who is managing wound care at home. The most valuable thing I learned was sterile technique, having been trained one on one by a registered nurse in an ICU setting. I am concerned to learn that people are not being adequately trained to manage the not so new normal.
Thank you so much for sharing your personal experience. We, too are concerned that not enough people are being trained in wound care basics, and we agree that knowledge of basic wound care techniques will be more critical in the future.