Recommendations for the future science of family caregiving services and supports: A synthesis of recent summits and national reports

Meeting the challenge of the impending family care gap will require coordination among educators, healthcare providers, researchers, and policymakers. Over the past 5 years, national summits, conferences, and working committees have been convened by national research institutes and other organizations to make recommendations for addressing family caregivers’ needs. In this chapter, we systematically distill over 350 individual recommendations from these efforts to clarify a scientific agenda to advance caregiving research and services. Recommendations are reported by the main target audience. For educators, the primary focus was on growing and training the workforce. For healthcare and service providers, the main recommendation was to integrate caregivers into regular practice. Researchers were encouraged to include caregivers and care recipients in setting research agendas, and to focus research on underserved and underrepresented caregivers. Researchers and providers should collaborate to implement effective interventions more broadly using implementation science methods. Finally, researchers and policymakers should work together to develop more comprehensive data collection and surveillance efforts. Our hope is that, by organizing these goals and linking them to recent research and policy developments, this chapter will contribute to a coherent, up-to-date agenda for supporting family caregivers that will better help to address the public health ramifications of family caregiving in the United States.