Caregiver’s Perspective On Challenges And Rewards Of Responsibility

Perspective of the caregiver: Roles and Responsibilities

What are The Caregivers Perspective Of The Challenges And Rewards Of Responsibility?

The interview was conducted to understand and analyze the perspectives of a care giver. The challenges and rewards those the care giver have to keep into consideration would also define her role along with the procedures she follows while taking care. The patient in the case is a 50 years old Male who have a brain injury and is unable to take food on his own. The feeding needs the care of a caregiver which is been adopted in this report to understand and examine the methodologies adopted and thus critically analyze the benefits it gives to the user. The perspective, challenges and thus the rewards for the job along with her recommendations for the future caregivers are documented herein.

The patient is a 50 years old male with eating disability due to a brain injury. The patient needs someone to look after him for the entire day but the feeding and cleaning needs the assistance of a professional caregiver. The daughter of the Patient is working lady with a Construction firm so have very limited time to care for her aging father. The task encompasses a lot of responsibility and needs a good amount of care and time to accomplish. The patient is unable to respond properly after the injury where the speech disability makes the job more challenging. However the mobility of limbs is still their but they are not strong enough for the man to support himself. Since the household of the man have a daughter who works for long hours without any support the care giving becomes impossible for her thus the professional care is needed. On the week offs the daughter takes utmost care for him but she is unable to feed her the patient due to problems in understanding the needs of the patient. Although the patient can hear and tries to respond accordingly but that reaction memory is lost within moments (Ohshima et al. 2004).

The care giver has been involved with this patient for last 4 months while she had a long care giving career with around 18 years of experience in the same field. Thus the position of primary care giver was a certified professional over the family which at the start of the phase made the job difficult. Preparation of the meal and feeding are two supports those are mostly done by the family (Neal & Wagner, 2011).  However, when the injury happened the daughter was already employed and could not afford the time needed to take care and thus she took a professional help. The working caregiver has been associated with this patient form the day he took his first meal after the coma period was over. The daughter tried to learn to feed him but she was unsure of how good she was in her job and rested on a professional to see that the best care is provided. Thus from the employer’s perspective the job needed specialist and thus the reliance on the caregiver was huge. Further the time dedicated to the job took 57 hours each week from the caregiver (Koutsoukou et al. 2006).

Challenges of the Care giving

However, the challenge is how many days the patient needs to be cared for. The medical advisor suggests that the care was needed till the time the patient was able to have his limb controls and speech back which in his view would need time of around 2 years. The assurance for the treatment to heal the personnel was not there so the perspective of the care giver was that the daughter needs to learn and earn some confidence in feeding the patient. Since the care giving would not last long for it is expensive and not the period would be too long for a professional to be assisting him. The time needed to feed, needs patience and persistence of caregiver (Alnazly, 2014). Therefore, the daughter needs to learn them for better care and relationship building with her father. The meal preparation, understanding the signs and body language of the patient, aiding him to communicate with sign languages while making the necessary changes to the meal for the patient to feel and taste the food, to start eating was kept in mind.

The challenges in care giving are the sense of responsibility and keeping the performance of care up to it. Further the responsibility involves giving sufficient amount of time to understand and communicate back to the patient. The sign languages are to be predicted which may mean anything to a layman but the caregiver needs to know what stands for what and how much those are necessary for patient care (Doyle, 2012). Medication times along with meal preparation with a constant eye on the patient are another major challenge which the care giver have got to understand and interpret in her 18 years of Career. The negative effects of not properly feeding a brain damaged patient with speech disability are many as the patient cannot react or communicate his feelings. Thus they needs to be understood and the care and the medications are to be applied on time with precise techniques those suites the man best. Further, for muscular functioning the patient needs to walk and stand with support at least twice a day as recommended by the Doctor. This process needs the help of both the daughter and care giver together to make the person stand and balance him selves with his two hands. This limb exercise needs a lot of care and is a challenging job which would need to be taken care till the time the patient learns and restores his physical strength to walk again. Furthermore, due to the brain damage the patient cannot recognize or remember the pat actions and commands of the care giver that needs the specialized care where the care giver has to start afresh with her duties. The feeding time and cleaning time are two period when the interactions with user and care giver is the most so the impact of this interactions needs to be fruitful else the purpose stays unresolved (Volberding, 2014).

Rewards and Recommendations: For Future professionals

The rewards of the care giving is in the satisfaction of it said the care giver. However, the time and patience along with basic medical and knowledge of treatments are few other things that the care giver needs to learn prior to the process (Hinrichsen et al. 1992). Thus the learning is another added advantage which the care giver had that she may use in her future jobs as learning and experience is unique. Nevertheless, there are few other sides of care giving as well which needs special mention as the people who would join the profession in the future must know how to handle patient where they also protect themselves from diseases and such harms of working with a sick user (Davis, 2000). The visit to the user is one aspect while the regularity in such a case is another. The dependence of the family on the care giver is enormous so if she is absent or out of town for some other job the daughter have to hire another one for the day. This process is eased by the care giver by inducting a younger professional with herself with patient’s consent so that when she is not present somebody else may do her job with equal efficiency. However the new practitioner needs further training and grooming before they could handle such patient effectively. The risk of mis-handling the patient are great so the well being as well as personal space or the work life balance is one major issue which needs to be maintained for a professional. The way they achieve it is the success key else the patient care may be affected due to concentration errors. The error of judgment is another aspect of positive resource development for care. What to feed at what time and how to understand what the patient wants needs to be learnt and interpreted with such patients, that comes with time and experience.

Emotional supports to the family of the user along with tangible assistance like teaching how to give care are the two other aspects that the caregiver takes care of. The practitioner, while with the patient and his daughter the effective ways of patient care is been taught so that the daughter too is competent in handling her father’s care needs (Richards & Vostanis, 2004).

Conclusions

The care giving to a person with mental challenges and physical disabilities needs complete support as they are mostly unaware of what to do, when and how, where the role of care giver. The learning for the family was another aspect which the caregiver took care of while also keeping the daily treatment strategic applications in mind. The sign language interpretation and getting the needed response from the bran injured patient is a challenge which the care giver faces each day but have effectively understood what to do in such cases. The learning for the job has enabled the learner to understand the challenges along with the right methodology use to solve them while keeping their own health and work life balance in order.

List of References 

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