When blue and green combine, the result is cyan. Like color mixing, caregivers blend many skills that first must be learned so that the outcome is a well blended hue of providing safety, security, trust and enhanced quality of life. In order to achieve this, it takes dedicated practice — understanding and accepting that mistakes will be make along the way. There are so many variables to the art of caregiving that when blended together can result in a beautiful not perfect! Can it be mastered?
I believe that caregivers can gain enormous confidence with exceptional training, continued education and the will to keep learning.
Caregiving, like art, is an every changing range of color and feelings, and for that I would say our mastery is in the journey. Atlantic Center for the Arts ACA , an artist-in-residence program supporting interdisciplinary arts collaboration and practice in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, stepped forward as a place where the artists could meet in retreat to reflect and create.
Helen Ramon, program officer of Bader Philanthropies, says:. Martin H. Blank Jr. In May , the professional artists came to ACA. Each artist brought their current process and program to the team. The professional artists then began the process of translating their work to a user-friendly format for caregivers.
Retreats and focus groups were held in Orlando, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles over a two-year period. Where is the space and time for reflection leading to this potential breakthrough? Atlantic Center for the Arts. However, a critical question remained as we began How could we develop an evidence base for our work? Our partner from the beginning, the University of Central Florida, was key, from convening the initial think tank administrators, faculty, and students held on campus to the all-important research component required three years later.
The research documented caregiver burden, depression, and overall quality of life. As you read this, researchers will be concluding beta testing but will continue to develop more evidence to support the initiative.
Finch describes the final, evolving product:. My quality days as a caregiver would have been more numerous and my caregiving would have been more inspired if the Creative Caregiving Initiative and toolkit had been available. On behalf of all the partners who made this initiative possible, our hope is that more caregivers will find their path less lonesome and their days less stressful, and that they will look back on their caregiving time with a sense of great memory and family legacy to be shared, with the arts as an integral part of their daily lives.
Burgio and colleagues demonstrated the ongoing benefits of the intervention as well as feasibility and acceptability on the part of community-based caregivers and service providers. As other federal initiatives emerge to encourage translation of evidence-based family caregiving interventions to communities e.
It is important to realize that translation is as much an art as it is a mechanistic endeavor. Quality hierarchies of evidence often have randomized controlled trials at their apex, but such studies may emphasize internal validity or the degree to which the investigator is confident in the observed empirical relationships in a study at the expense of external validity generalizability of results.
For these reasons, simply implementing an efficacious randomized control trial with little acknowledgment of practice context will lead to lack of feasibility if not outright failure when delivered in everyday situations. The advent of strategies such as community-based participatory research CBPR methods has in part been designed to achieve this balance. Although definitions of CBPR vary, common themes include the following: a recognition of community context in influencing health behavior and eventual outcomes; full involvement of community members in selecting research questions and topics, designing subsequent research efforts, data collection, and interpretation of findings; integration of both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies; and emphasis on translating research findings to everyday utility and practice Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, With calls from the current U.
These developments represent a new era in how researchers and practitioners collaborate in designing family caregiving research.
Into this fluid environment of increased community engagement come two welcome books on family caregiving: Aging Families and Caregiving , edited by Sara H.
Qualls and Steven H. Aging Families and Caregiving emerged from an annual conference held at the University of Colorado—Colorado Springs on clinical geropsychology. The book is structured according to the following sections: The initial section describes the aging family context, the second section focuses specifically on caregiving issues; the third section summarizes clinical services for families; the fourth section provides an overview of social services and policies that shape family caregiving practice; and the final section introduces emerging technologies that can assist caregiving families.
The section introduces a number of key definitions e. An emphasis in this section, and one that is sure to stimulate discussion among students, is the emergence of nonnuclear family patterns and how this may influence service delivery.
The second section of Aging Families and Caregiving turns to key topics and findings pertaining to family caregiving. The chapter by Martha Crowther and Audrey Austin offers a number of important insights related to the cultural context of caregiving and how clinicians can most effectively work in these diverse contexts. One aspect of the chapter that I found useful was the analysis of service utilization and cultural differences.
Another strong entry is provided by Mary Ann Parris Stephens and Melissa Franks, which describes care provision to chronically ill and disabled older persons. An area of this chapter I found extremely helpful was an introductory section that outlined the emergence of chronic illnesses among older populations in developed countries, defined the concept of comorbidity, and examined how these trends have influenced family care provision.
Although the literature on family caregiving is immense and much of it of limited clinical relevance or quality , the third section of Aging Families and Caregiving offers a concise overview of some of the key findings in family caregiving and how this information can influence the delivery of clinical services. The following section is the most compelling for clinicians. It begins with a superb chapter on assessment and intervention for family caregivers by Judy Zarit, which demonstrates in a clinically appealing fashion how to integrate the use of validated tools with clinical strategies to assess key issues and concerns among families.
The subsequent chapter, by Steven Zarit, provides a review of evidence-based interventions for family caregivers. Unlike existing literature reviews or meta-analysis, this chapter provides an effective clinical framework specifically, Robert L. The subsequent chapter, by Sara Qualls and Tara Noecker, probably holds the greatest clinical relevance in the entire volume: It provides a through procedural and structural overview of family sessions.
An excellent case review is also provided. A common element in many successful caregiving interventions is the incorporation of a family session component, and Qualls and Noecker provide a welcome addition to guide clinicians in administering family sessions.
The next chapter, by Margaret P. Norris, reads more as a clinical reflection on addressing family issues in residential long-term care. Strengths of the chapter include an in-depth review of the legal and ethical issues that arise when attempting to deliver psychotherapy to families in long-term care settings. I love this definition of grace. This is where grace comes in. I would encourage you to print this definition and tape it somewhere you can see it regularly.
Grace is allowing yourself to give you the stamp of approval, find favor on yourself, show yourself kindness, give yourself clemency, find reprieve and allow a temporary exemption. How do you put this into action? Here are a few ideas:. Discover a new hobby — check out what your community recreational center has to offer.
Take a cooking or painting class, tennis or swimming lessons, use the gym or the rock wall. Keep your health in mind — taking steps to improve your diet and moving your body will help you feel your best, and when you feel your best, you can be a better friend, wife, husband, caregiver.
Attend a support group in your area — being able to hug others who can relate to you is a great source of support.
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