Caring for Caregivers of Aging Canadians: Assessing and Prioritizing Promising Practices and Selecting Interventions for Future Implementation

Across Canada, people are living longer with chronic conditions and depend on the unpaid support from family members and friends to meet their care needs (over and above what is provided in the health care system). Caregivers have to make enormous personal sacrifices when providing care and may experience stress and burnout as a result. Our overarching aim is to ensure that caregivers across Canada have access to high quality support so they can continue in their role while maintaining a good quality of life. To achieve this, we will conduct an environmental scan to see what services or programs are available and appear to be working well for caregivers. We will then host a 2 day meeting of experts (caregivers, formal care providers, policy planners and researchers) to review the list of caregiver programs and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of them. During this discussion we will create a "short list" of the most promising programs (i.e., perceived to be aligned with the needs of caregivers, and potentially easy to replicate across the country). In our final phase, we will convene a smaller working group to put together a proposal for additional funding to implement and evaluate a chosen caregiver program in different parts of Canada.