Systems Imperative - Valuing Care - 2023 08 21

 


It takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to care for village members who can no longer fend for themselves. It is anti-social to leave the care of a family member who cannot fend for themselves to one isolated family caregiver. It undermines health outcomes for our society when we accept this approach as a default solution.

Valuing care as an integral, essential component of our healthcare system needs to include valuing family caregiving. Institutional healthcare providers are placing increasing dependence on family caregivers to make up caregiving infrastructure deficits that are arising from institutional and government care mismanagement, negligence or system deficiencies.

Whether the negative socio-economic impacts of family caregiving can be attributed to mismanagement, negligence or system deficiency, the solution lies in understanding the systems imperative to improve outcomes for family caregivers.

When we value care, when we value family caregiving, we are changing the system. When we act on those values, we make it possible to implement sustainable system change.

It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to care for village members who can no longer fend for themselves. It takes a village to value caring and to implement sustainable system change based on those values.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Exploited - 2024 06 04

Image
The convenient rationale for shifting caregiving to family homes is that it 'costs less'. This is a false claim that perpetrates a healthcare system that is exploiting family caregivers. Family caregivers are typically exhausted and burned out. They feel exploited by the healthcare system because their time and material costs are not acknowledged or compensated anywhere near approaching their actual expenditures.  To access any supports, they have to add work to their already over-extended schedule to research, make applications, provide documentation, etc. The value of supports is eroded by the cost of accessing them. Family caregivers feel taken advantage because their time and material expenditures are not tracked or accounted in the health care system. They are assumed to give their resources to the care of a family member as an individual choice, rather than a collective, community responsibility. However, there is no real choice, because the alternative to their family ca...
Read more

One hundred percent responsible - 2024 08 27

Image
  There are 168 hours in a week (24 x 7). When you are operating a long-term care bed in your home for a family member who can no longer fend for themselves, your hours of caregiving duty is 168 hours a week. That is 100% of the time. That is why becoming a family caregiver is the same magnitude of change as becoming a new parent. You are responsible for the health and welfare of another human being. When you have respite, say, for 8 hours a week, from Home Support, then your caregiving hours for that week are 160. Overnights count. You are still on call and responsible for the health and welfare of your care recipient. If we were to hire an external caregiver to stay overnight with Mom so we could get a night away, the rate should be budgeted for at least $30/hr. A 10 hour sleepover (if you have 1 hour to get to bed, 8 hours sleep, and 1 hour to get up in the morning), that would cost $300 for that one overnight. Even then, we are responsible and on call. Does anyone have access t...
Read more

Making the best of it

Image
  We didn’t plan to become unpaid family caregivers. Forty-five years ago, as we plotted our careers for early retirement, we didn’t factor in taking care of our 92 year old, mentally ill, developing dementia, end stage COPD, arthritically disabled mother. We may not have had concrete plans at that stage of our lives, and we also did not know what caregiving was, what it meant to be a family caregiver, or what it meant to be an unpaid family caregiver. This is family life. This is the life of a family over decades. This is the end of a long life that waited many years to come home from the mental health group home system. We thought we were prepared for Mom to come home. We tore out the bathtub and installed a no barrier shower. We emptied out our basement suite and set up a new bedroom for Mom and a guest room for unpaid family to come and stay with Mom. We knew that Mom could not be left unattended for any extended length of time. We knew that Mom was too frail to continue living...
Read more