Caregiving for older adults with disabilities

Efforts to encourage more labour market participation and to extend the working lives of Canadians, as well as the loss of retirement savings on the part of many Canadians, further suggest that many individuals and families will need to continue to manage both paid work and care work well into the future. [...] Although caring for family members and friends is a normal midlife experience, there is increas- ing recognition both of caregiving’s potential to affect the life course of caregivers profoundly and of the limits to the care that family and friends can provide. [...] Moreover, these effects can accumulate and in- tensify over the lives of adult caregivers and spill over to other stakeholders, such as employers and public service providers, thus jeopardizing the sustainability of the public care sector and affecting both the labour force and employer’s profits. [...] These positive features have been shown to promote better physical and mental health for caregivers, to reduce the burden of and negative reactions to the problems of the care recipient, and to improve coping with and adaptation to the care- giving situation and ultimate bereavement (Carbonneau, Caron and Desrosiers 2010). [...] Despite robust evidence of the cost-effectiveness of home care (Hollander 2001; Hollander and Chappell 2007), there has been a hollowing-out of health and continuing care systems since the 1970s: health services increasingly are provided outside the medicare or hospital systems; there is a distinct trend toward the privatization and commodification of health and continuing care; and home care serv