Caregivers in Michigan are reaching a breaking point

Many medical students are intimidated by the challenge of having to gather accurate histories and establish connections with patients with dementia. A non-profit, Arts and Minds, is helping students get more comfortable by connecting them with patients outside of the clinic through museum visits.

Dementia units and long-term care homes for the elderly are often desolate and lonely places, with harried workers attempting to meet the needs of their patients while also meeting government-set metrics of success. For families and individuals, it can be difficult to imagine a better way. However, a pilot program in Canada called the Butterfly room is showing that dedicated efforts to making long-term care homes a vibrant and loving place for someone's last days has positive impacts for everyone - and is worth a government investment do right across the country.

Liquid morphine offers a low-tech, low-dose alternative to other opioids when it comes to pain management. Uganda has taken steps to increase palliative care by allowing nurses to prescribe doses of morphine to patients, due to the shortage of doctors. The drug is affordable or free to some patients, and the low doses in liquid form prevents patients from developing addictions associated with other opioid drugs.

A Chicago-based program called Caring Together, Living Better is aiming to increase support to family members acting as caregivers for the elderly in their lives by providing resources directly in their churches. Focused primarily on minority communities, this creative collaboration uses trained volunteers to provide resources to those in attendance.

SEIU represents about 500,000 home care workers nationwide, offering union benefits and protections like individual health care, a retirement program, raises and better wages, additional training and access to personal protective equipment. For many — especially those working in Washington, California, New York and Illinois — unionization is a large part of the solution for home caregivers to receive representation and a living wage.

To better serve patients struggling with dementia, a hospital in Berlin established a department of geriatrics and began screening "patients for cognitive impairments upon admission, providing them with trained volunteers for personal support and non-pharmacological interventions to prevent delirium." This course of action has helped the hospital to diagnose cases earlier and offer dementia-specific care for patients, which consequently has reduced the prescribing of drugs for these patients.

Virtual memory cafes for people with dementia are able to reach more people, avoid transportation and mobility barriers, and open new possibilities — like making new friends across the ocean. First pioneered in the Netherlands in the 1990s, memory cafes have spread around the world as a way for people experiencing memory loss and caregivers can find community and companionship.

Centers like Brattleboro Retreat are emerging to provide specialized recovery programs for healthcare workers battling addiction. Programs offered are similar to those at standard recovery centers, except here healthcare workers are surrounded by their professional peers, allowing them to find community and express vulnerability.

The James L. West Center for Dementia Care’s Senior Day Program offers engaging activities like dance, music therapy and cooking classes, and a sense of community for people with dementia, while giving family caregivers a break. The Center currently cares for about 13 people each day, though it has the capacity for up to 20 people and is slated to expand to help more people.

Companies like Sanofi are beginning to partner with organizations like Bright Horizons to offer eldercare benefits to employees, like in-home adult care services. The benefit allows Bright Horizons to dispatch care workers to a person’s home and the company administering the benefit subsidizes the majority of the cost. Providing eldercare benefits reduces the burden on employees, allowing them to be more present at work. Since the pandemic, Sanofi has seen a 20% increase in the number of employees registering for the eldercare benefit program.