Raise your hand if you're a caregiver.
Now, raise your hand if you wish your loved one's doctor recognized the role you play in the care process.
Now, raise your hand if you lied on that last one and kept your hand down.
The thing is, 37 million Americans just like you care for a loved one at home. You change wound dressings, help with medications, prevent falls and generally keep your loved one out of the hospital. But, family caregivers haven't traditionally been recognized as a part of the care team of doctors, nurses, and other clinicians.
Dr. Pauline Chen took an insightful look at this topic in her "Doctor and Patient" column in the New York Times. She writes:
For all our assertions about the importance of caring in what we do, doctors as a profession have been slow to recognize family members and loved ones who care for patients at home. These “family caregivers” do work that is complex, physically challenging and critical to a patient’s overall well-being, like dressing wounds, dispensing medication, and feeding, bathing and dressing those who can no longer do so themselves.
Many of these caregiving tasks were once the purview of doctors and nurses, a central component of the “caring professions.” But over the past century, as these duties increasingly fell to individuals with little or no training, doctors and even some nurses began to confer less importance, and status, to the work of caregiving.
As a caregiver, I'm sure those words speak to you as they did me. Doctors, nurses, and family members are all a part of the senior care team. To ensure the best outcomes for our loved ones, we have to draw upon all the senior care resources available to us.
But to family caregivers, it's more than that. There's a deep sense of devotion and reward that comes from helping a loved one.
Dr. Chen quoted another doctor, a Harvard physician named Arthur Kleiman. He said, "There is a moral task of caregiving, and that involves just being there, being with that person and being committed. When there is nothing that can be done, we have to be able to say, ’Look, I’m with you in this experience. Right through to the end of it.’ ”
As caregivers, we agree.
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