Two years ago, in 2022, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) devised a strategy to support family caregivers. The need for change was all too clear.

The report, the “National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers” noted that:

• In 2019, at least 53 million people were providing informal, usually unpaid, care and support to aging family members and people of all ages with disabilities.
• Add in the grandparents and other relatives who pitch in as primary caregivers, and that number jumps to approximately 56 million.
• These numbers are growing — fast — due the rapidly growing populations of older adults and people with disabilities; the long-standing shortage of direct care workers, which has reached crisis proportions; the continuing opioid crisis; and other issues

As many of you know, family caregivers are the foundation of the nation’s system of long-term care. Replacing the support they provide with paid services would cost an estimated $600 billion, according to AARP.

The 2022 strategy was developed jointly by the advisory councils created by the RAISE Family Caregiving Act and the Supporting Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Act, with extensive input from the public, including family caregivers and the people they support. It had five goals:

1: Increase awareness of and outreach to family caregivers;

2: advance partnerships and engagement with family caregivers;

3: strengthen services and supports for family caregivers;

4: ensure financial and workplace security for family caregivers;

5: expand data, research, and evidence-based practices to support family caregivers.

And it presented nearly 350 actions the federal government would take to support family caregivers in the coming year — limited, however, to activities possible under existing budgets, programs, and authorities — and more than 150 actions that could be adopted at other levels of government and across the private sector to build a system to support family caregivers.

The U.S.Dept. of Human Health & Services has now released the “2024 Federal Progress Report” on the strategy. So, how is it doing? Below, a quick summary.

• Nearly all of the 350 federal actions have been completed or are in progress, and federal agencies have committed to almost 40 new actions since the strategy’s release nearly two years ago.

This includes:

• New Medicare payments for family caregiver training services.
• Increased federal funding for research and technical assistance related to caregiving and implementation of the National Strategy.
• Enhanced data collection and public health surveillance to better understand family caregivers and their challenges.

There’s much more needed, and hopefully much more help on the way. The update is a fairly easy, if long, read, so check out the report if interested in the details.

Photo: Nathan Anderson on Unsplash