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UC Davis Family Caregiving Institute — Interprofessional Family Caregiving Competencies (2021)

Sexson KE et al. "Interprofessional Family Caregiving Competencies." Family Caregiving Institute, Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis, June 2021. Developed for use in undergraduate, graduate, and professional clinical education.

Key findings used in wiki

Why this document exists

  • By 2050, for every 100 adults age 15–64 in the U.S., there will be 36 adults age 65+ — a dramatic rise in the age-dependency support ratio that places a growing share of care work on family caregivers (Redfoot, 2013, cited in the report).
  • Family caregivers routinely perform medical and nursing tasks — medication management, dressing changes, oxygen tank handling, incontinence care — that most have received no formal training for (AARP's Home Alone study, Reinhard 2012).
  • Family caregiving spans "everything from administering medications to accurately recognizing clinical deterioration to managing appointments and billing to providing personal assistance to discussions of end-of-life preferences" — and much of this currently goes unrecognized by clinicians.
  • The authors argue that clinical education has a direct role in improving caregiver outcomes by moving away from a health-system culture that ignores family members and toward a family-centered approach that recognizes caregivers as integral members of the health team.

The four domains

The competencies are organized into four domains and are explicitly designed to define what clinical training should produce:

Domain 1 — The nature of family caregiving

Health professionals should be able to: describe major theoretical perspectives (e.g., stress-process model), describe positive and negative consequences of caregiving, recognize heterogeneity across situations, and identify key sociocultural variables (ethnicity, SES, family values).

Domain 2 — Family caregiving identification and assessment

Health professionals should be able to:

  • Incorporate identification of who is or has a family caregiver into routine health assessments.
  • Assess care recipient and family caregiver preferences and values to determine goals and priorities.
  • Use valid and reliable tools to assess family caregiver preparedness, relationship quality, and the positive and negative consequences of caregiving — including quality of life, burden, physical and mental health, social isolation, and financial strain.
  • Monitor and respond to changes in the caregiving situation over time.

Domain 3 — Providing family-centered care

Health professionals should be able to: include care recipient, caregiver, and others in shared decision-making; implement evidence-based interventions tailored to needs, preferences, goals, and priorities; identify formal and informal support options; incorporate caregiver self-care into the care plan; and develop a caregiving support plan based on strengths, limitations, and resources.

Domain 4 — The context of family caregiving

Health professionals should be able to: tailor assessment by illness condition; describe patient, provider, and health-system factors that facilitate or interfere with caregiving; recognize conscious and unconscious biases; tailor assessment and intervention to sociocultural variables; and understand local, state, and federal financing that impacts caregiver populations.

Definitions the field uses

  • Family Caregiving — provision of care by people related by blood, marriage, or affinity (including families of choice).
  • Family Caregiver — the person(s) who provide assistance with IADLs, ADLs, or complex care tasks.
  • Healthcare Team — explicitly includes the family caregiver alongside the care recipient, primary care providers, specialists, psychologists, allied health, social work, care coordination, and spiritual guidance.

Why it matters for the wiki

  • Gives a clinical-education-standard anchor for GiveCare's design. The competencies are what clinicians are being trained to produce; GiveCare operationalizes much of Domain 2 (identification and longitudinal assessment with valid tools) and Domain 3 (shared decision-making, tailored support, integrating informal and formal supports) at caregiver scale — where clinical time and workforce alone cannot.
  • Supports the pre-validation claim that GiveCare is not outside the clinical consensus — it is inside what the field has already defined as required skill. That is load-bearing for partnership conversations with health systems, payers, and clinical training programs.