Caregiving for the Elderly

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses that the time and effort, both physical and emotional, required to provide compassionate, timely and appropriate caregiving to another person can assume mammoth proportions, but the hospice approach has been proven to be an invaluable asset for home-based caregivers. The author points out that hospice refers to a concept of care rather than a physical location. The hospice movement's goal is not cure, with all of its aggressive interventions, but palliation of symptoms to help manage the psychological and social difficulties encountered by terminally ill patients, their caregivers and family. The paper stresses that the burdensome, demanding and stressful caregiving responsibilities require that the caregivers take adequate time for themselves to prevent caregivers from engaging in abusive behaviors toward their patient.

From the Paper:

"In fact, by 2025, it has been estimated that there will be over one billion older people worldwide. This extension in life expectancy to well beyond 80 years of age is the result of better public health measures, improvements in living conditions, and advances in medical care. At the same time, there have been some fundamental changes in the American family that have created a wide range of variations, with numerous permutations of step-children, step-parents and step-grandparents being the norm rather than the exception. No longer is the family unit as cohesive as it was, say, in the middle of the 20th century, so the family members who assume caregiving responsibilities for the elderly may not even be directly related to the individual. Studies have shown that the relationships that exist before an individual requires caregiving tends to dictate what type of relationship will continue to exist, but the fact remains although there is universal agreement that full-time caregiving responsibilities are enormously stressful; some people make better caregivers than others."

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