Help us to identify strategic areas for action. Let’s come together to improve the wellbeing of Albertan’s hidden workforce of caregivers.
Family caregivers are the unsung heroes of Alberta and Canada’s healthcare system, providing essential care to individuals with chronic illnesses, disabilities, and age-related challenges. An estimated 26% of Albertans provide unpaid caregiving, contributing millions of hours annually—work valued at $11 billion, about 1/3 of Alberta’s entire yearly health spending. Increasingly, family caregivers are taking on complex medical tasks traditionally performed by healthcare professionals, including managing medical equipment, administering medications, and caring for wounds, often with little formal training or support.
Beyond medical care, caregivers foster well-being, dignity, and social connections, enabling individuals to live meaningful lives. Their involvement improves patient safety, care quality, and continuity, benefiting not only care recipients but also healthcare systems. Yet, despite their indispensable contributions, caregivers often face emotional, physical, and financial challenges that undermine their well-being and the quality of care they provide.
Since 2013, Caregiver Centred Care at the University of Alberta has worked with key collaborative partners, using co-design principles, to learn from caregivers and support their needs. We are driven by a vision where family caregivers are recognized, supported, and empowered as integral partners in the health system and in health neighbourhoods—fully engaged in integrated care systems of health, social, and community services.
Who is a family caregiver (carer, care-partner)?
A family caregiver is any person ( family, friend, neighbour, or chosen family) who takes on a generally unpaid caring role and provides emotional, physical, or practical support in response to physical and/or mental illnesses, disabilities, or age-related needs.
Leading the Way: Innovating Integrated Supports for Alberta’s Family Caregivers, led by Dr. Jasneet Parmar and the Caregiver-Centred Care Team , is a three-year project to bring together interdisciplinary collaborativepartners from across the province to fortify the support systems available to family caregivers in Alberta. Theaim is ensuring that family caregivers receive care that is centered around their needs to support theircaregiving and maintain their own wellbeing. A strategy and implementation/action plan to achieve mutuallyagreed-upon goals will be co-produced by collaborative partners with an interest in supporting family caregivers.
Building on our foundation of co-design and collaboration, the Leading the Way project draws together family caregivers, health and community care leaders, providers from health, and community sectors, business and not-for-profit organizations, educators, policy influencers, researchers, and designers in a shared purpose to enable Alberta’s family caregivers to thrive. We are engaging many partners in co-designing an integrated Alberta Caregiver Strategy, Action and Implementation Plan (Strategy Map). This includes strategy mapping with actionable priorities to integrate care and support across the community and health sectors, education, communities of practice, scale up and spreading of solutions and evaluation.
We have established a co-design team of family caregivers and representatives from the health and social/community sectors to guide the development of the strategy. As critical partners, their lived experience, expertise and advice throughout the process is vital to developing a strategy that will have lasting impact.
From July-September, the project team interviewed 44 individuals involved in providing health and social/ community programs and services to Albertans. Those interviewed included organizational leaders and professionals with insights and expertise in caregiver supports, the community-based service sector, the health care system, the delivery of care and services, allied health professions and integrated health, social and community service models.
This work captured valuable information on the current successes and efforts underway to support family caregivers across Alberta—including programs and services for caregivers, education and capacity-building efforts, caregiver engagement and information provision, community-led initiatives, collaboration, planning and evaluation. We also gathered insights into the challenges and barriers impacting these efforts and advice for developing an Alberta strategy.
We analyzed the transcripts for common themes related to barriers, gaps, and opportunities in supporting caregivers. From this, the team identified 18 initial potential priority areas. These were shared with the Alberta Family Caregiver Co-design Team in Fall 2024. Through group discussions, the Co-design team affirmed these initial priority areas as a valid foundation and offered detailed feedback to help refine wording, meaning, intent and alignment of the priority areas. The project team drew on this focused input to refine and consolidate theseinto primary strategies and supporting strategies and strategic actions and to develop guiding principles to further anchor the strategy development.
The Leading the Way project team is now seeking input from across Alberta to shape the integrated Alberta Family Caregiver Strategy. As we move towards action and implementation, we invite health, social and community care leaders and those with experience and expertise in family caregiving to help us determine which strategies and actions to move forward together.
In late 2024 and early 2025, we will be bringing together groups with like interests and roles for focused discussions (over 2-3 meetings) on the primary and supporting strategies and guiding principles—to share what’s important to them and their interest and ideas in working towards action. Contact us to learn more.
Build a better system to support family caregivers throughout their caregiving journey.
