Caregiving Responsibilities
Assistance with Daily Living
Family caregivers responsibilities provide a range of essential support with routine life tasks. For example, assistance with the activities like managing finances, laundry, household chores, home maintenance, bill payments, transportation, and meal preparation, are expected duties of family caregivers.
As a result, some may also require help with self-care tasks, such as bathing, grooming, toileting, and dressing. Further, family caregivers help care recipients with medication management and doctor’s appointments.
Medical Tasks
Most importantly, the family caregivers responsibilities will perform simple healthcare duties at home. In fact, medications may be administered not only orally but also via patches, injections and intravenously. In instances of severe illness, the family caregiver will manage equipment. For example, feeding tubes, wound care systems or catheters.
Symptom management and monitoring the recipient’s condition are the family caregiver’s responsibilities. In short, the family caregiver will manage fever, dehydration, delirium, and complex medication regimens. Hands-on procedures, like infusion pumps and wound care, are also increasingly in the realm of family caregivers.
Care Coordination
Family caregivers will find themselves making doctor’s appointments for their recipients. This is part of the caregiver’s responsibilities and support for their loved one. In fact, the caregivers accompany them doctor’s office, speak to the doctor and order prescription medications. They also change or otherwise handle the medical insurance, for instance. Moreover, family caregivers are responsible for identifying and procuring resources to facilitate the healthcare. They may deal with potential payers, like Medicare or Medicaid. In addition, the caregiver may even help a senior family member transition to a new care setting, like an assisted living facility.
Emotional and Social Support
Caregivers are instrumental to emotional well-being of any care recipient. It can provide peace of mind for the recipient knowing they’re well taken care of. By devoting their time and skills to support someone, caregivers responsibilities are making life more comfortable and at times just plain livable. Namely, some support qualities should be patience, possession of empathy, radiation of positivity and have an eye for their specific needs.
Decision Making
Firstly, the family caregivers responsibilities will be making decisions on the care recipient’s behalf. Subsequently, frail individuals may require the assistance from family caregivers to execute their decisions.
For instance, several aspects influence decision making. These include the care recipient’s and family caregiver’s values, preferences, abilities, goals, and perceptions. Caregivers and care recipients may not always agree. For support, both parties may utilize living wills, power of attorney and personal care agreements.
In fact, when decision-making capabilities are lost, most care recipients prefer to involve family caregivers as surrogate decision makers. In other cases, decisions are made after a caregiver is appointed via power of attorney, advance directive or when the courts formally appoint a guardian.
