Family Caregiving
Our health experiences team is working to secure funds so that all of our materials will, one day, be available in English, French, and, eventually, other languages. In the meantime, our YouTube clips offer an auto-generated closed captions feature which may or may not be wholly accurate. Thank you for your understanding.
Caring for a relative or a close friend can have a wide range of impacts on the caregiver. We interviewed 39 people across Canada who had experience of caring for someone with a chronic physical illness. Some recently started as a caregiver while others had many years of experience caring for someone. About half of the caregivers we interviewed were women caring for their husbands, and others were women or men caring for other family members or friends, including parents and adult children. The caregivers told us about their experiences including the good moments and the challenges they encountered as a caregiver. Click on any of the topic pages on the left to hear and read about their experiences related to self-care, the impact of caregiving on their own health, support from family and friends, and more.
You can listen below to an introduction by Dr. Mark Yaffe, Family Physician and Professor in Family Medicine, McGill University, talking about the nature of family caregiving and its impact and importance.
This module on family caregiving is based on research by the Canadian Health Experiences Research Group.
Introduction by Mark Yaffe
1. Importance of Caregiving in Canada
Transcript
Who are caregivers in Canada and why is caregiving an important topic in healthcare right now? I’m Mark Yaffe. I’m a family physician at McGill University, a Professor in Family Medicine affiliated with St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal, which is my clinical teaching and research base. And in the area […]
2. Impact of Caregiving
Transcript
What do we know about the impact of caregiving on caregivers’ health? Caregivers, when they commit themselves, commit in a number of different ways. And the first is that they commit time. And that precedes the health issue, but leads to the outcomes on health. In Canada in an average […]
3. Caring for yourself
Transcript
What can caregivers do to help look after themselves and where can they go for information and support? Looking after oneself is something that not many of us are good at. It’s not something that we think about consciously. And there are different ways to approach self care as caregivers. […]
4. Doctors and caregivers
Transcript
The Relationship between Doctors and Family Caregivers Having said that caregivers should feel comfortable going to see their health professionals for help. There is a literature that tells us that physicians in particular, have difficulty at times relating to family caregivers. Some of that difficulty reflects ignorance or lack of […]
“If Canada’s health care system were a plant, family caregivers would be its roots – fragile, vital and invisible.”
– Donald Cameron