Family Caregivers on the Job: Moving Beyond ADLs and IADLs

More than 27 million family caregivers in the United States provide care to seriously ill or disabled family members at home. But for all the increased attention that family caregivers have received in recent years, we still have no good way of fully describing or accurately measuring what family caregivers actually do, what it is that makes their work rewarding or challenging, and what help they might need to continue. Absent this knowledge, we cannot begin to design the educational and support services that might spell the difference between satisfaction and burnout, fulfillment and despair. Instead, we continue to rely on Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs)— tools developed to measure care recipients’ functional deficits—to assess the realities of the lives of their family care providers. This volume captures a year’s worth of fruitful debate among experts convened from around the country to analyze the limitations of ADLs and IADLs and to explore alternatives.