How family caregivers can benefit from respite care

What is Respite Care?

Respite care is a type of assistance that allows the family caregiver to take a break from care-giving. This type of care focuses on helping family caregivers recharge, ease their stress, and avoid caregiver burnout. Rather than spending time attending to daily duties, respite care provides assistance and support to the family caregiver. Keeping the caregiver healthy and supported results in higher quality time spent together. The longer a family member can provide appropriate care, the longer the loved one is able to stay comfortably at home.

Role of a Family Caregiver

The role of a family caregiver can be an honour and a privilege. Some caregivers acknowledge they enjoy having the opportunity to “repay” their parent by caring for them. Caring for a loved one can be a rewarding experience, but intense or long-term care can often have a negative impact on the caregiver’s health and well-being. This is especially difficult if you are a first-time family caregiver. These individuals often struggle with balancing their role as a caregiver with their own family’s needs, or caregiving and paid employment. This often leads to a situation where the caregiver feels overwhelmed and confused about what steps to take next in their caregiving journey combined with the effects of anticipatory grief, and may put the family caregiver at risk of:

• Psychological effects such as depression, anxiety, and anger
• Health related issues resulting from chronic stress, lack of sleep and/or physical exercise
• Personal financial problems
• Negative career consequences
• Drug/alcohol abuse
• Elderly abuse

In order to prevent the risks mentioned above, you should consider respite if you’re a caregiver.

Types of Respite Care

Respite care can be provided at home or in a long-term care facility. Care can be provided by friends, neighbours, family members, volunteers, or a home health care service provider. Some examples of respite care services include:

• Personal Care
• Companionship
• Meal Preparation
• Medication Reminder
• Light Housekeeping
• Nursing

Respite care also benefits the person receiving care in the following ways:

• Developing and nurturing the care recipient’s social, recreational and life skills;
• Reducing stress and improving long-term functioning of both caregivers and care recipients;
• Preventing crisis situations and elder abuse.

Respite Resources are Available and Necessary for Family Caregivers

If you are a family caregiver, find some time this summer to focus on you. You deserve an extra hand or some time to take care of yourself.  Help Now care services offers respite care and home health services that are individualized and designed especially for you. Contact us about home care services TODAY!

The four kinds of respite in Ontario

“Respite” covers several different things, and families often only know about one of them:

• In-home respite. A caregiver comes to the house for a few hours so you can leave. Best where the person is unsettled by unfamiliar surroundings, and the easiest to start with.
• Adult day programs. Your family member spends the day at a community program — activities, a meal, other people, often transport included. Widely available across Ontario, usually subsidized, and consistently the most underused option. It solves two problems at once: your break, and their isolation.
• Short-stay respite in a long-term care home. A stay of up to a set number of days, arranged through Ontario Health atHome. This is what makes an actual holiday, or a surgery of your own, possible.
• Overnight in-home respite. Someone stays the night so you sleep. For caregivers who are up several times a night, this is often the single most valuable thing available.

Publicly funded respite is arranged through Ontario Health atHome — you can ring and ask for an assessment yourself. Private respite can be booked directly and is usually quicker to start.

Book it before you need it

The most common mistake is treating respite as an emergency measure. Adult day programs can have waiting lists; short-stay beds are limited and need arranging well ahead. A caregiver who waits until they are at breaking point discovers that nothing is available for six weeks.

The more useful pattern is to build respite into the schedule from the start — one regular afternoon a week, booked and protected — before there is a crisis to recover from. It is far easier to keep a routine going than to start one when you are exhausted.

Using it well

• Leave the house. Respite spent in the next room doing laundry is not respite. Go out.
• Do not fill it with errands. The first few times, most caregivers use the hours for the bank and the shopping. Try to protect at least some of it for something restorative.
• Expect a difficult start. The first two or three sessions are often refused or resisted. Familiarity is what makes it work, so book several before deciding whether it suits.
• Introduce the person gradually. A short visit with you present, then a longer one without.
• Write things down. Routines, likes, dislikes, what settles them, what upsets them. A one-page sheet makes the difference between a good session and a bad one.

It is not selfish, and the arithmetic backs that up

Caregiving at home only continues for as long as the caregiver can sustain it. When a caregiver’s health fails, two people need care instead of one, and the move to long-term care usually happens sooner and under worse circumstances. Respite is not a luxury bolted onto the care plan — it is part of what keeps someone at home.