Grant: Operating Grant

Parents caring for children with health problems face tremendous demands on their time, energy and financial resources. Such demands can be associated with poorer health among the caregivers themselves. These health effects are not limited to caregivers of the most seriously disabled children, but instead may occur in over 25% of all caregivers. The current study will be the first to study the vast amounts of routinely-collected health care administrative data to address this important public health issue. We will use data from the British Columbia and Manitoba health care systems to address several objectives: 1) How can we categorize good and poor child health using these data? 2) How can we measure differences in the health of caregiver groups using these data? 3) How does caregiver health change over time, before and after individual life events such as birth of a child with a health problem? 4) Is the complexity of caregiving (the number of doctor's visits, number of medications the child uses, etc.) related to caregiver health? This study brings an established, multidisciplinary team together to develop a new approach to understanding caregiver health and to better inform what services and policies will best address the needs of caregivers of children with health problems.