Family caregivers contribute $450B in care
Earlier this week, the AARP released a report that found the unpaid contributions of family caregivers in the United States in 2009 was approximately $450 billion. While the report didn’t correlate an exact dollar figure with how much family caregivers are saving the healthcare system, without them, “the economic cost to the U.S. healthcare and long-term services and supports (LTSS) systems would increase astronomically.”
“What we’re calling the ‘new normal’ in this report is really very much about healthcare,” said Susan Reinhard, RN, PhD, senior vice president for public policy, AARP Public Policy Institute, and one of the authors of the report. “It has to do with the expectations we have for family caregivers to provide healthcare at home.”
AARP’s report found that about 42.1 million family caregivers provided care to an adult with daily activities limitations at any given point in time and about 61.6 million provided care at some time in 2009. These family caregivers provide support services ranging from paying Mom’s bills to bathing and dressing to bringing Dad to doctors’ appointments to managing Aunt Joan’s medications.
“People have 15, 20 different medications and they’re very serious medications with very serious side effects. . . . We expect families to monitor for those side effects, to call somebody if they see something, to stop it on their own,” Reinhard said. “This is the care coordination we’re talking about.”
As healthcare reform continues to emphasize care coordination, it is important for healthcare systems to include family caregivers in treatment coordination – not just to view them as the people driving the patient home, Reinhard said.
“We want them to feel they are worthy of respect and attention,” Reinhard said. “And that’s where this $450 billion figure should be translating into ‘You better respect me. You do not want me to walk off the job. If I walk off this job, the country is holding a pretty big bill.’”
In addition to making family caregivers a part of the team, the healthcare industry can do a number of things to support them, Reinhard pointed out.
Be aware of the pressures family caregivers are under, Reinhard said and respond to them accordingly. The AARP study noted that family caregivers have high levels of stress and depression brought on by emotional upset, financial hardship and being pulled in different directions by other family obligations and employment, among others. These stresses can cause the health of the caregivers to suffer and can lead to re-hospitalizations of patients as misunderstandings and mistakes happen.
[See also: Study reveals costs of caring for aging parents.]
Providing support groups, education and simple compassion goes a long way.
“We expect family members to do things that make nursing students tremble. We have to recognize that,” Reinhard said. “We have to give them the respect and the training and the support that they need.”
