Skip to content

Start with your Area Agency on Aging

A caregiver who doesn't know whether to call a home-care aide, a paid care manager, a hospital social worker, or a government office often loses time trying to guess, then gives up. The useful first move is not guessing among those options. It's routing the caregiver to the one part of the aging network built specifically to sort that out: the local Area Agency on Aging.

Area Agencies on Aging, funded under the Older Americans Act (Title III-E and VI-C), are the part of the aging network that USAging — the national association representing Area Agencies on Aging — is working to strengthen specifically for caregiver navigation. USAging describes this work as connecting caregivers "to vital resources at the right time and in the right way," addressing the fact that many of the more than 63 million unpaid caregivers in the United States struggle to navigate the complex systems of support available to them.1

That effort includes a 50-state environmental scan of current caregiver-navigation practices, built from input from Area Agencies on Aging, State Units on Aging, technology leaders, and family caregivers, and 18-month grants to twelve Aging Network organizations across multiple states to evaluate caregiver-navigation processes and their effect on caregiver outcomes.1 That evaluation is still underway. This strategy uses the Area Agency on Aging as a well-supported first call for a caregiver who doesn't know where to start — it does not claim that caregiver navigation services have been shown to improve outcomes, and it does not pick which specific professional (aide, case manager, or social worker) a caregiver needs. That determination belongs to the local agency's own intake process.

Runtime shape

Use this strategy when a caregiver's bottleneck is not knowing who to call, not when they already have a specific, well-matched resource in mind or are facing a medical emergency or safety crisis. The strategy has four parts:

  1. Confirm that not knowing who to call is the actual obstacle.
  2. Get the caregiver's state or ZIP code.
  3. Name the local Area Agency on Aging as the first call for caregiver navigation.
  4. Route directly to a more specific resource instead, if the caregiver already has one in mind.

Good output should sound like a clear next step — one phone number or one search away — not a lecture about the aging-services system.

  1. USAging. "Caregiver Navigation Services." Source → ↩↩