Role of Gender in Caregiving Burden

Abstract

As the world is transitioning to an increase in the elderly, with decreasing communicable diseases worldwide, and charting an increase in Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), there is a need to adjust for caregiving burden in the society. This piece of work will focus on caregiving burden among the female gender which pose as an important public health issue that needs attention from the global society. From literature, it is shown that females are the predominant providers of informal care for family members with chronic medical conditions including dementia. Studies identified higher levels of stress and greater challenges faced by both female spousal and family caregivers. Multiple interventions cutting across globally have shown that the caregiving burden can be decreased by certain interventions for caregivers. Identified strategies include identification of caregivers in health care and workplace settings to promote political consciousness raising, collecting and reporting on data that frame caregiving as a policy problem, borrowing policies and language from overlapping fields to emulate their policy successes, and presenting supportive caregiver policies as solutions to other policy problems.