AARP’s Susan Rheinhard is a rock star of aging research. Her latest album— ummm I mean study— explores the incredible creativity and resolve that families and friends use to support each other in times of need.
Susan and her team found that…
Almost half (46%) of family caregivers performed medical/nursing tasks for care recipients with multiple chronic physical and cognitive conditions
Three out of four (78%) family caregivers who provided medical/nursing tasks were managing medications, including administering intravenous fluids and injections
Caregivers found wound care very challenging, more than a third (38%) wanted more training
Most family caregivers who provided help with medical/nursing tasks believed they were helping their family member avoid institutionalization
Read More HERE
Family caregivers are America’s barefoot doctors. They are a GIGANTIC addition to our health care labor force and they are doing incredible things almost always without clinical training or experience.
It is also worth noting that most of them do this with the explicit goal of “helping their family member avoid institutionalization.”
Over the past ten years the Eden Alternative has been working to strengthen and support these family care-partners. We call our approach Eden at Home and it is changing people’s lives.
What is Eden at Home????
The Eden at Home Series applies the power of the Eden Alternative‘s ten principles to improving quality of life for Elder(s) living at home and their care partners. By our definition, care partners include family, friends, neighbors, volunteers, home health professionals, and the Elder herself. With an eye for changing the culture of care at the grassroots level, EAH emphasizes building creative and collaborative care partner teams empowered by concepts central to person-directed care. We promote a culture of meaningful care in our communities that does not see the needs of caregivers as separate from the needs of care receivers, but rather advocates for the well being of the whole care partnership. Working together, empowered care partner teams help to ensure the independence, dignity, and continued growth and development of our Elder care partners and each other. With this in mind, Eden at Home operates on three levels:
As an inspiring philosophy that offers a sense of renewal – care partners need to experience renewal on a daily basis;
As a source for practical, hands-on tools for improving quality of life for all involved in the care partnership; and
As a motivational model for shifting both how we care for one another and how our communities perceive what our Elders have to offer.
Read More HERE
Taking this in a slightly different direction…
I was discussing this study the other day with writer Howard Gleckman, in particular the range of care provided in the community every day by this non-licensed group of family care partners, and bringing the concept back to the nursing home.
Unfortunately, our regulations hobble our non-nursing staff when it comes to such activities as assistance with meals (surplus safety?). It would be nice if we could recognize that many staff members and volunteers could be enabled to safely provide some assistance through less burdensome regulatory requirements, so the onus for assistance with all daily activities doesn’t fall on the nursing staff.
I totally agree, my sister in law was a c.n.a. at a nursing home, she could not even put oxygen back on residents, while at home her son had a port for cancer, which she flushed weekly with heparin, after education from St. Judes! ….Crazy?