International Approaches to Family Caregiver Support: Lessons for the United States

The issue of family caregiver support is highly relevant to public health. Each year in the U.S., family caregivers provide billions of dollars of uncompensated care to disabled elderly relatives and parents, while at the same time, risking a detrimental impact on their own physical, mental, social, and financial health. Finding effective policy approaches to support family caregivers is a large piece of the puzzle for long-term care in the United States. This essay examines whether innovative international approaches to family caregiver support could inform and advance current U. S. policy. The study focuses on legal recognition of caregiver status in Belgium and the mandatory caregiver assessment in the United Kingdom (UK). Formal legal caregiver recognition would allow U.S. policymakers to leverage the existing policy infrastructure at the state and federal level to support family caregivers, potentially providing a mechanism for greater employment flexibility, tax benefits, and formal recognition of the economic contributions of caregiving. The UK approach to caregiver assessment provides a model for caregiver well-being, goals, and supports to be integrated into long-term care planning in a more structured way