By Susan C. Reinhard, PhD, RN, FAAN, senior vice president and director, AARP Public Policy Institute, chief strategist, Center to Champion Nursing in America; Elaine Ryan, MPA, vice president of state advocacy and strategy integration, AARP government affairs; and Trish O’Keefe, PhD, RN, NE-BC, interim president, Morristown Medical Center, New Jersey

Teaching a daughter to help her mother with range-of-motion exercises

The public trusts nurses to care for them and to teach them how to care for themselves and for those they love. But a 2012 AARP/United Hospital Fund report funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation, Home Alone: Family Caregivers Providing Complex Chronic Care, shows there is a big disconnect. In this first nationally representative study of families providing complex care activities, almost half reported that they had provided medical/nursing treatments, including injections, wound care, administering multiple medications, managing colostomies, and giving tube feedings and nebulizer treatments—among many other tasks that nursing students find daunting when they are first learning how to do them.

Family caregivers are expected to step right in, with little to no instruction or support. Most (nearly 7 out of 10) of those they cared for did not get a home visit by a health care professional, despite multiple encounters […]