How could family caregivers better support patient care after discharge?
Hi everyone, I’ve been talking with providers about how family caregivers are integrated into patient care, and I’d love to hear your perspective.
In 2024, Medicare started covering family caregiver training that’s tied directly to a patient’s treatment plan. So instead of a general caregiver resource, an example could be a physical therapist giving a 30 min training to a caregiver on how to safely assist with transfers as part of that patient’s treatment plan. I’m trying to better understand how you see family caregivers supporting discharge plans today, and whether this patient-specific training could play a meaningful role here.
I know caregiver involvement can vary a lot across patients (and sometimes even identifying the caregiver can be difficult), so I was hoping to get your thoughts on a few questions:
- When you’re discharging a patient with a family caregiver, what does your interaction with the caregiver typically look like?
- After patients go home, do caregivers commonly reach back out to your team? If so, what are the most common reasons?
- Looking back, are there situations where better caregiver preparation before discharge might have changed what happened after the patient went home?
Any thoughts would be really appreciated.