Formal Service Practitioners' Views of Family Caregivers' Responsibilities and Difficulties

Abstract

This article identifies home care practitioners' perceptions of the responsibilities, difficulties, and needs for support of caregivers. It is based on a study undertaken in Quebec with 55 practitioners and 10 administrators from 10 CLSCs located in rural, urban, and metropolitan areas. The study had a qualitative, multiple-case design and used logs recording all contact with caregivers in the space of a week, followed by semi-structured interviews. Analysis reveals that practitioners tend to perceive the work of caregivers as mainly instrumental and clinical, ignoring the family relations that tie them to their relative. Although aware of the difficulties facing caregivers and the negative impacts of caregiving, a majority of practitioners have high expectations of caregiver participation in treatment plans, albeit as quasi-nurse's aides. Our analysis offers an explanation for this apparent contradiction by examining practitioners' values with regard to family responsibility for care.

Formal Care Providers' Perceptions of Home- and Community-Based Services: Informing Dementia Care Quality

“…Little attention has been given to the perceptions of formal health care providers, that is, paid professional and nonprofessionals, on the nature and quality of home-and community-based dementia care (Guberman, Lavoie, Pepin, Lauzon, & Motejo, 2006). The challenges of providing quality care have been underpinned by aging demographics (Forbes & Neufeld, 2008;Forbes, Neufeld, & Reutter, 2003;Gaugler & Kane, 2007), lack of financial resources to implement and sustain a health and socially based home care infrastructure to provide support to the informal caregiver and formal care provider (Health Council of Canada, 2008;McAdam, 2000), movement of acute and chronic facility-based care to community settings without the corresponding transfer of funds (Rajnovich, Keefe, & Fast, 2005;Romanow, 2002), early hospital-to-home discharge policy (Armstrong, 2002), and a focus of home care services on acute problems and physical needs versus a more holistic approach that focuses on maintenance, prevention, and promotion of health (Kushner, Baranek, & Dewar, 2008).…”

Observing Women Caregivers’ Everyday Experiences: New Ways of Understanding and Intervening

“…The experiences of the women in the study reflect the mixed messages that women caregivers commonly receive from practitioners, to both take care of themselves yet to continue providing increasing amounts of care (Guberman et al, 2006). Observing women caregivers' daily lives can allow multidisciplinary practitioners the opportunity to personalize women's work, understand its impacts, develop increased empathy, question the messages they are conveying to women caregivers, and to adapt their practices accordingly.…”

“…Those caregivers who do receive services often find that their needs are conflated with those of the care receiver (Guberman, Lavoie, Pepin, Lauzon, & Montejo, 2006). Supports for the care receiver -bathing assistance, in-home services -may be considered as supports for the caregiver, and files are infrequently opened for the caregiver herself (Keefe, Guberman, Fancey, Barylak, & Nahmiash, 2008).…”

A source of strength and empowerment? An exploration of the influence of disabled children on the lives of their mothers in Karachi, Pakistan

“…It is widely recognised that the support of family caregivers, mostly women, is an important contribution to the quality of life experienced by children and adults with disabilities in the home and community-based setting [1,2]. When a child experiences functional impairments and possible longer term dependency on the parent, the increased demands of care-giving can be more challenging.…”