Caregiving, in social environments rather than mainstream healthcare facilities, has been largely invisible - kept out of sight in age-segregated facilities - and economically unaccounted for when delivered by family caregivers. This will change as the global population ages and caregiving becomes not only a growth employer but a new core competency that all will need to master.
The World Economic Forum recently flagged jobs in the Care Economy as one of the rising new professional job cluster1. Longevity trends are pushing caregiving firmly onto the learning and skills agenda. As caregiving needs grow, and individuals of all ages are involved in caregiving, it will in turn elevate hands-on experiential learning, as well as fuel the development of community networks of learning focused around this topic.
Interactions between caregiving networks and typical healthcare systems also need to mature. It is clear that even a combination of state-funded and private-pay healthcare systems will not be able to cope with the care needs of the aging population. It is also well established that people with care needs more often than not have concomitant health problems. In this context it is crucial that care and healthcare networks interface seamlessly to facilitate a holistic approach to an individual’s needs. Learning strategies in both groups of providers, and crucially funding streams, have to account for and actively support this collaborative approach.
1 https://www.weforum.org/reports/jobs-of-tomorrow-mapping-opportunity-in-the-new-economy
We see three opportunity areas here:
Growth in professional caregiving
Improving support for informal caregiving
Age-friendly literacy and anti-ageism
Demand for professional caregiving jobs continues to outstrip supply in most western countries. Recent estimates suggest that the UK could be short of 360,000 care workers by 20262, exacerbated by uncertainties around immigration.
As a result, new systems, techniques and policies are required to recruit, train and retain care workers, especially in light of an older adult population with increasingly complex care needs. Boston-based start-up CareAcademy3 is tackling the challenge of delivering scalable, personalized education to professional care organizations that adapts as the needs and roles do. Their platform “delivers engaging video-based classes and real world scenarios that walk through aspects of the caregiver experience”.
2 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/brexit-freedom-of-movement-plan-care-workers-uk-eu-shortage-a8501751.html 3 https://careacademy.com
We can ask better questions to drive the debate:
Few people self-identify as caregivers, yet three in five people in the UK will provide unpaid care to friends or family at some point in their lives.
According to the UK charity, Carers Trust, there are approximately 7 million informal caregivers in the UK today (set to hit 10 million by 2030) providing £132 billion worth of care a year. One in seven of the workforce are carers (5 million people), however 600 people in the UK give up work every day due to the demands of caregiving4. Eighty-four percent of informal carers surveyed in the 2013 ‘State of Caring’ Survey said that caring has had a negative impact on their health, and 64 percent cite a lack of practical support5. Some innovations on the horizon offer signposts to promising solutions. Huddol6 is a social network that provides a collaborative, supportive environment to help people connect with others going through similar challenges, find healthcare professionals, and access resources. TimeSlips7 is an improvisational storytelling method in which older adults with cognitive impairment imagine stories and poems in response to inspiring cues, which can be an enriching substitute for lost memories.
4 https://www.carersuk.org/news-and-campaigns/press-releases/facts-and-figures 5 https://www.england.nhs.uk/commissioning/comm-carers/carer-facts/ 6 https://www.huddol.com/ 7 https://www.timeslips.org/
Over 1,000 towns and cities around the world have joined the World Health Organization’s Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities program8. They develop priorities and an action plan to become an age-friendly town, city or in some cases state. Recently, the WHO has also made battling ageism a priority, as it launches its ‘decade of healthy ageing’. These efforts speak to the importance of delivering a framework for ‘literacy’.
As the first co-located nursery and care home in the UK, Nightingale House and Apples & Honey Nightingale are pioneering intergenerational programming for their residents and students. The premise is that intergenerational care provides wisdom to the young and meaningful relationships to the old.
At a larger scale, one of the WHO age-friendly cities, Louisville, Kentucky, is making plans to adapt to the rapid increase in its 60-plus population, from 15 percent today to an estimated 40 percent by 2050. Their strategic plan starts with a thorough assessment and indexing of the current state of age-friendly activities in the county and a tailored activity programme in each area. Going beyond the efforts of many cities, they established a $5m start-up accelerator for ageing innovation and a non-profit community innovation hub, the Thrive Center, to connect more effectively with local residents.
8 https://extranet.who.int/agefriendlyworld/
Caregiving is likely to become a part of all of our lives at some stage. By asking and answering the questions posed in this post we can drive towards solutions for the challenges we will all face in the future, both as givers and receivers of care.