Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

By 2031, 2.2 million older Canadians will need someone to care for them. Most (about 80%) of this care will be provided by informal caregivers such as family and friends. The burden of caregiving can make caregivers distressed, affecting the health of both patients and caregivers. Currently, we do not have a good understanding of factors that make caregivers distressed, nor how distress impacts the care-recipients in the long term. In my research, I aim to 1) Describe the proportion of distressed caregivers in Ontario and identify characteristics of care-recipients/caregivers associated to caregivers being distressed. 2) Determine if older adults cared by distressed versus non-distressed caregivers differ in their health and resource use. 3) Describe how caregivers' distress status change over time, and identify factors associated with initially non-distressed caregivers becoming distressed. 4) Evaluate if older adults cared by distressed caregivers will have poorer health outcomes and more resource use over time than those with non-distressed caregiver To achieve these, I will use population-based data collected by the interRAI Home Care Assessment (RAI-HC). RAI-HC is routinely given to all Ontarians seeking or receiving home care. It is linked to other healthcare data, including hospital records and physician claims, at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Science. This allows us to comprehensively and longitudinally analyze the long-term health and resource use of older adults according to their caregivers' distress status. As supporting older Canadians becomes a policy priority, research on caregiver distress and its effect on patient outcomes will inform policy decisions on home care reform, including the $2.3 additional funding for home care recently announced through the Federal Health Accord. It will also help healthcare providers identify caregivers who are likely to become distressed and enable development of better resources to support caregivers.