This site is dedicated to providing information about caring for elderly and disabled loved ones. Most of this information is based on my own experiences and information I have collected.

Caregiver [noun]
a family member or paid helper who regularly looks after a child or a sick, elderly, or disabled person.

From Wikipedia:
Caregiver
See also: Carers rights movement and Caregiving and dementia
The words “carer” (UK, NZ, Australian usage) and “caregiver” (US, Canadian usage) are normally used to refer to unpaid relatives or friends who support people with disabilities. The words may be prefixed with “Family” “Spousal” or “Child” to distinguish between different care situations. Terms such as “Voluntary caregiver” and “Informal carer” are also used occasionally, but these terms have been criticized by carers as misnomers because they are perceived as belittling the huge impact that caring may have on an individual’s life, the lack of realistic alternatives, and the degree of perceived duty of care felt by many relatives.

A paid worker may be referred to as a “care worker”, “professional caregiver”, “personal assistant”, “healthcare assistant (HCA)” or “care assistant”, but there is a considerable degree of variation and overlap in everyday and professional usage and “carer” is sometimes used informally as a synonym.

A widely-accepted definition of a carer/caregiver is:

“Someone whose life is in some way restricted by the need to be responsible for the care of someone who is mentally ill, mentally handicapped, physically disabled or whose health is impaired by sickness or old age.”
Baroness_Pitkeathley (1989) It’s my Duty Isn’t it? London: Souvenir Press.
More recently, Carers UK has defined carers as people who “provide unpaid care by looking after an ill, frail or disabled family member, friend or partner”.

Around half of all carers are effectively excluded from paid employment through the heavy demands and responsibilities of caring for a vulnerable relative or friend. Their work has huge economic and social impact.

With an increasingly aging population in all developed societies, the role of carer has been increasingly recognized as an important one, both functionally and economically. Many organizations which provide support for persons with disabilities have developed various forms of support for carers as well.

My plan for this site is to provide an easy-to-digest source of information to give someone who is new to caregiving a place to start to prepare for their role as caregiver.

When I began caring for my Mother, I was overwhelmed with the amount of information available online and through various organizations. It is not that the information is not out there, but often finding exactly what you need can be a long a tiring process which is especially difficult for the lone caregiver, or people who have families and jobs to divide their time.

Caregiving can draw heavily on one’s available resources so any shortcuts will make a huge difference.

Some of my current goals for the site are to keep it simple and to make it visitor driven. To clarify, I do not plan to “commercialize” the site. There are many good information web sites on the subject of caregiving, but I find that many of them are selling a service, or focusing on a publication, so the information on the site is not necessarily focused on problem solving. I am by no means an authority on the subject, so I hope to get additional contributors to the site that can discuss their particular problems, or more importantly, their solutions.

I would also like this site to be community driven. People contributing, asking questions, and hopefully receiving helpful answers that new people can look up and use. At some point I’d like to consider the function of the site to be a database to help navigate all the other information that is out on the web.

This site is currently under heavy construction, so there isn’t much available, but if you have come upon this site, please bookmark it and check back often for updates. And if you have an ideas, by all means share it with me via the contact page and I will throw it into the list of site considerations.

Thank you.