Veterans as Caregivers:Those Who Continue to Serve

Limitations

One limitation of this project was the intentional exclusion of the women’s clinic from the sampling process. For consistency, the authors wanted to limit the intervention to 1 PCC and so they chose the clinic that serves the majority of the veterans who receive primary care at VASLCHCS. Additionally, the literature showed that male caregivers compared with women caregivers^20,21 have different characteristics in regards to caregiver burden, and a well-designed study of women caregivers already has been published.¹⁹

Also, this study did not obtain data on age, health problems, or socioeconomic status of the caregivers to avoid identifying information. Last, the authors did not ask about time spent caregiving or type of care provided. These questions may be important for future studies. Future investigations should evaluate health care use and health of caregivers vs noncaregivers in the veteran population. It also could be important to determine methods for building bridges between the VHA, AAAs, and other community services.

Conclusion

To minimize the disruption that a research study might have caused to normal clinical workflow, the primary author played the role that a medical social worker or other PACT member might play in the future. This project sheds light on how to improve outcomes for community referrals and an important future step in this research would be to develop and test a process that would integrate the PACT into the referral process.

More than one-third of veterans seen in the VASLCHCS PCC are caregivers. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first estimate of prevalence of caregiving in veterans who receive primary care from the VHA. About 63% of caregiving veterans perceived some burden due to caregiving, and 66% accepted referral to community resources. However, only 12% who were asked to self-refer made contact with the AAA compared with 64% when a provider made the referral for them. Provider referral is more effective in connecting caregiving veterans with resources. Development of interagency partnerships should be fostered to help veterans decrease caregiving burden.

This project is one of the few studies looking at this special group of caregivers: veterans who serve as caregivers. It highlights the need for the VHA to establish policies and partnerships to improve caregiver support to this valuable group of veterans.