Family Caregiver Assessment in Primary Care: How to Strengthen the HealthCare Triad?

Abstract

This editorial comments on the article by Riffin et al. in this issue.

Family Physician’s and Primary Care Team’s Perspectives on Supporting Family Caregivers in Primary Care Networks

“…In fact, some teams were developing procedures within their primary care networks to support the family caregivers who were registered patients. These results reflect the increasing interest in healthcare providers' role in supporting family caregivers [36][37][38].…”

“…Interpretive description was designed to find out what is known and not known about healthcare practices with a purposive sample. This study follows a scoping review in which we found that collaborative primary care models were recommended as the most feasible model for supporting family caregivers yet there was little literature on family physicians' perspectives on their roles in supporting family caregivers [36].…”

“…The UK is moving to a social prescribing model [29], in which a navigator or link worker receives the physician's referral and works collaboratively with family caregivers to connect them to health and community services. It is not clear that tackling navigation will overcome the obstacles of the patient-focused system and the structural barriers such as insufficient time and reimbursement which are identified by primary care professionals as larger barriers to initiating consistent care for family caregivers [28,30,36,37,42].…”

“…New models such as Doctors of BC policy paper "Circle of Care: Supporting Family Caregivers in BC" [40] and the Manitoba Caregiver Recognition Act, [54] lay the groundwork for family caregiver assessment and support. Now policies, practice guidelines, reimbursement models, and educational curricula are needed to translate research and recommendations into practice [36]. Specifically, other studies have also recommended that ethics guidance [55,56] and billing codes are needed for work with family caregivers in primary care [42,44,46].…”

Reply to: Comment on: Family caregiver assessment in primary care: How to strengthen the healthcare triad?

“…1 Much less is known about how primary care providers attend to the needs of family caregivers of older adults with chronic conditions that do not include cognitive impairment but that might require substantial family member time and effort to help such older adults remain as independent as possible at home. 5 Comorbidity burden is one source of heterogeneity in primary care for older adults, 5 and family members of patients with substantial comorbidity burden could be targeted for caregiver assessment if and when they accompany their relatives to primary care visits. Following the dementia care model, for other chronic or life-threatening conditions such as different types of cancer, congestive heart failure, and diabetes, the point of diagnosis would be an ideal springboard toward implementing caregiver assessment tools for those family members who accompany older adults to outpatient medical care visits.…”