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Elderly care, or simply eldercare, serves the needs of old adults. It encompasses assisted living, adult daycare, long-term care, nursing homes, hospice care, and home care.
Long-term care (LTC) is a variety of services which help meet both the medical and non-medical needs of people with a chronic illness or disability who cannot care for themselves for long periods. Long-term care is focused on individualized and coordinated services that promote independence, maximize patients' quality of life, and meet patients' needs over a period of time.
Respite care is planned or emergency temporary care provided to caregivers of a child or adult.
A caregiver, carer or support worker is a paid or unpaid person who helps an individual with activities of daily living. Caregivers who are members of a care recipient's family or social network, and who may have no specific professional training, are often described as informal caregivers. Caregivers most commonly assist with impairments related to old age, disability, a disease, or a mental disorder.
A stay-at-home mother is a mother who is the primary caregiver of the children. The male equivalent is the stay-at-home dad. The gender-neutral term is stay-at-home parent. Stay-at-home mom is distinct from a mother taking paid or unpaid parental leave from her job. The stay-at-home mom is forgoing paid employment in order to care for her children by choice or by circumstance. A stay-at-home mother might stay out of the paid workforce for a few months, a few years, or many years.
Carers' rights are rights of unpaid carers or caregivers to public recognition and assistance in preventing and alleviating problems arising from caring for relatives or friends with disabilities. The carers' rights movement draws attention to issues of low income, social exclusion, damage to mental and physical health identified by research into unpaid caregiving. In social policy and campaigning the movement distinguishes such people's situation from that of paid careworkers, who in most developed countries have the benefit of legal employment protection and rights at work. With an increasingly ageing population in all developed societies, the role of carer has been increasingly recognized as an important one, both functionally and economically. Many organizations which provide support for persons with disabilities have developed various forms of support for carers/caregivers as well.
Family caregivers are "relatives, friends, or neighbors who provide assistance related to an underlying physical or mental disability for at-home care delivery and assist in the activities of daily living (ADLs) who are unpaid and have no formal training to provide those services."
A professional live-in caregiver provides personal care and assistance to individuals, including those suffering from chronic illness, Alzheimer's disease, and dementia, within the home setting. Typical duties of a live-in caregiver include meal planning and preparation, assistance with grooming, dressing and toileting, medication management, laundry and light housekeeping, and transportation/escorts to doctor's appointments or social engagements. Professional live-in caregivers are often provided by an outside agency, which may also coordinate their services with the client's preferred in-home health agency and other medical providers.
Caregiver syndrome or caregiver stress is a condition that strongly manifests exhaustion, anger, rage, or guilt resulting from unrelieved caring for a chronically ill patient. This condition is not listed in the United States' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, although the term is often used by many healthcare professionals in that country. The equivalent used in many other countries, the ICD-11, does include the condition.
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is an American social justice advocate and businesswoman.
Care work includes all tasks directly involving the care of others. The majority of care work is provided without any expectation of immediate pecuniary reward. Instead, it is undertaken out of affection, social norms or a sense of responsibility for others. It can also be a form of paid employment.
In the United States there are approximately 50 million people who are caring at home for family members including elderly parents, and spouses and children with disabilities and/or chronic illnesses. Without this home-care, most of these cared for would require permanent placement in institutions or health care facilities.
The International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC) is a grassroots women's network campaigning for recognition and payment for all caring work, in the home and outside. It was started in 1972 by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Brigitte Galtier, and Selma James who first put forward the demand for wages for housework. At the third National Women's Liberation Conference in Manchester, England, the IWFHC states that they begin with those with least power internationally – unwaged workers in the home (mothers, housewives, domestic workers denied pay), and unwaged subsistence farmers and workers on the land and in the community. They consider the demand for wages for unwaged caring work to be also a perspective and a way of organizing from the bottom up, of autonomous sectors working together to end the power relations among them.
Ai-jen Poo is an American labor activist. She is the president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She is also the director of Caring Across Generations, a national coalition of 200 advocacy organizations working to transform the long-term care system in the US, with a focus on the needs of aging Americans, people with disabilities, and their caregivers.
A moneyless economy or nonmonetary economy is a system for allocation of goods and services without payment of money. The simplest example is the family household. Other examples include barter economies, gift economies and primitive communism.
The Eldercare Workforce Alliance (EWA), a project of the Tides Center, is a coalition of 35 US national organizations that came together to focus on short- and long-term healthcare workforce issues relating to older adults. The Alliance helped pass the 2018 Raise Family Caregivers Act, supports ongoing funding for the Title VII Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program, and advocates for including elder care in government and professional policies, including related questions of educating and maintaining the labor force such care requires.
Caregiving by country is the regional variation of caregiving practices as distinguished among countries.
Family Responsibilities Discrimination (FRD), also known as caregiver discrimination, is a form of employment discrimination toward workers who have caregiving responsibilities. Some examples of caregiver discrimination include changing an employee's schedule to conflict with their caregiving responsibilities, refusing to promote an employee, or refusing to hire an applicant.
Sarita Gupta is a British-American social justice activist and vice president of US Programs at the Ford Foundation. Her career has focused on workers' rights and human rights. She joined the Ford Foundation in 2019, initially as director of its Future of Work(ers) program. Prior to that, Gupta served for 20 years in various leadership roles at Jobs With Justice, including as executive director from 2007. During that period, she also co-founded and served as co-director of Caring Across Generations.
In the U.S. State of Washington, long-term care insurance is provided to eligible residents through the WA Cares Fund. The first of its kind in the United States, Washington’s public long-term care insurance will start paying benefits to qualified residents in July 2026. Residents who qualify can use their benefits to pay for long-term care services and supports such as home caregivers, medical equipment, home safety evaluations and renovations, assistive technology, family caregivers, and long-term care facilities.
References
- 1 2 3 Flanders, Laura (April 30, 2012). "Can 'Caring Across Generations' Change the World?". The Nation . Retrieved Aug 17, 2024.
- ↑ "About Us". Caring Across Generations. Retrieved Aug 17, 2024.
- ↑ Ling, Lisa; Novak, Analisa; Luibrand, Shannon (April 25, 2024). "The hidden costs of unpaid caregiving in America". CBS News . Retrieved Aug 17, 2024.
- ↑ Pastor, M.; Speer, P.; Gupta, J.; Han, H.; Ito, J. (June 13, 2022). "Community Power and Health Equity: Closing the Gap between Scholarship and Practice". National Academy of Medicine . NAM Perspectives . Retrieved Aug 17, 2024.
- ↑ "The Coalition: Caring Can't Wait". Caring Across Generations. Retrieved Aug 17, 2024.
- ↑ Seitz-Wald, Alex (Aug 4, 2023). "Multipronged $50 million campaign backed by labor aims to prioritize child and senior care". NBC News . Retrieved Aug 17, 2024.