In the United States today, there are an estimated 43.5 million individuals caring for someone with a serious illness or disability. Providing care to a loved one can be a full-time job, one that is often performed in addition to paid employment and other responsibilities. Family caregivers of patients with advanced serious illness have been reported to provide an average of 8 hours of daily assistance, including monitoring symptoms, providing transportation, coordinating care, communicating with health care providers, administering medications, providing emotional and spiritual support, and managing dietary needs. Clearly, they are shouldering a heavy load to provide care for their loved ones, yet they receive no direct formal support to address their own needs.

Taken together, these tasks become burdensome, and in combination with seeing someone close to them struggle with illness, family caregivers can experience psychological distress at a level equal to and sometimes greater than their care recipients. Such high levels of family caregiver distress have been associated with depression and anxiety symptoms, poor physical health, and high mortality risk. Moreover, family caregivers are often not prepared for their care recipient’s end of life and frequently experience negative aftereffects following the care recipient’s death, such as regret and complicated grief. The taxing role of family caregivers has thus been recognized as a public health crisis.

To address this need and become a pioneer among U.S. healthcare systems to innovate in this area, the UAB Caregiver and Bereavement Support (CBS) Service was officially established within the UAB Center for Palliative and Supportive Care in October 2017. CBS is led by two Co-Directors, Dr. Dionne-Odom in the UAB School of Nursing and Dr. Grant Williams in the UAB O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center. Strategic direction and guidance is provided by an interdisciplinary steering committee that includes palliative care, oncology, nursing, medicine, social work, chaplaincy, psychology, navigation, marketing, and health care administration, as well as family caregivers. The mission of CBS is to optimize the well-being and skills of family members whose day-to-day lives are affected by someone close to them dealing with life-threatening illness from diagnosis through grief and bereavement.

Clinical Care and Education

The CBS services meets is mission clinically by assisting existing UAB clinical care service lines and departments with identification, adoption, and implementation of caregiving support services and programs. We provide one-on-one consultation, coaching and technical assistance with: needs assessments, program and support service identification, cultural tailoring, community partnership and stakeholder development, clinician training, metrics and measurement, day-to-day operation review, and maintenance support.

Two of our signature partnerships to date have included the UAB Division of Neuro-Oncology and the UAB Memory Disorders Clinic. Read about our work with Neuro-Oncology here!

Research

CBS Service aims to be a recognized leader in caregiving research, by supporting collaborative, interdisciplinary, and thriving research programs. CBS leadership and steering committee members have nationally recognized research expertise in family caregiving research, which you can learn more about here. We also provide research consultation to investigative teams for all aspects of research design and execution related to family caregiving.

To learn more, please contact: