The FAMILY HEALTHCARE PLAYBOOOK

The Family Healthcare Playbook: An Action Plan for the Accidental Caregiver is a practical, step-by-step guide for working adults suddenly thrust into the world of caregiving. Born out of a blind-siding medical crisis and the subsequent caregiving journey Karesha McGee experienced with her mother, this book helps the reader and their loved ones prepare for a future medical issue or manage if they're already in one. It also assists the reader in navigating their new, unexpected role as a non-professional, unpaid caregiver or helps them cope if they are already in the thick of it.

Combining the wisdom and comfort of a trusted friend with the urgency and directness of your favorite teacher, who always tells it like it is, this book includes:

• Best practices, lessons learned, and advice to help you and your loved ones prepare for a future medical issue or manage through one if you’re already in one.

• Family medical templates and worksheets for you and your loved ones to complete, along with links to other online support resources.

• A discussion guide and series of conversation starters designed to help you navigate your caregiving journey and initiate potentially tricky conversations with your loved ones.

• Short checklists of action items you can begin working on today! The items are organized by time, with recommendations on how to get started, whether you have 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or a few days to work on this.

I am all for using technology to help address challenges with caregiving, and early research and reports indicate that AI may become an enormously helpful tool for medical professionals and caregivers. However, this playbook's words of advice and templates are surprisingly low-tech by design. Why?

Despite technology interventions, all medical issues involve people and the complexities, emotions, neurosis, and stressors of being human. Yes, there are many ways to “optimize” and “enable” caregiving with technology, i.e., telemedicine, diagnostic testing, etc. Still, when your loved one is in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) or you’re suddenly faced with a life-or-death decision, a lot of that “tech” goes out the window. Caregiving and all associated with it will – and should – always require a human touch.

Unpaid caregiving has become an epidemic in the United States. The Family Caregiver Alliance estimates approximately 43.5M caregivers have provided unpaid care to an adult or child in the last 12 months, and about 34.2M Americans have provided unpaid care to adults aged 50 or older.* Those numbers are expected to accelerate dramatically in the coming years due to a steadily aging population, post-COVID-19 healthcare needs, and increasing demands for home healthcare services. Unpaid caregiving is also a tremendous economic drain on our society: Care provided by these millions of unpaid caregivers totaled $600B in unpaid contributions in 2021, a $130 billion increase from 2019.** While plenty of resources, programs, and infrastructure exist for paid (professional) caregivers, unpaid caregivers are often left to fend for themselves… until now. 

*Statistics from the Family Caregiver Alliance, “a small task force of families and community leaders in San Francisco came together to create support services for those struggling to provide long term care for a loved one….” (n.d.)

**Statistics from 2023 AARP Report: New AARP Report Finds Family Caregivers Provide $600 Billion in Unpaid Care Across the U.S.