Older Adult Informal Caregivers

When it comes to informal caregiving, one often thinks of older adults, aged 60 years and older, as care-recipients. However, with increasing life expectancy – resulting in individuals living for a longer duration in old age, and reduction in family sizes – resulting in a smaller of pool of potential informal caregivers, older adults are also likely to become informal caregivers themselves. Their care-recipients may be other older adults, such as parents, spouse, or partner, or those younger, such as children, with care needs.

Older adult caregivers are a particularly vulnerable sub-group of informal caregivers, given that they must attend to their caregiving responsibilities while managing age-related declines in their own physical, psychological, and cognitive health. Despite this, few studies focus on older adult informal caregivers. Furthermore, less is known about the heterogeneity within older adult informal caregivers.

My colleagues and I at the Centre for Ageing Research and Education[RM1]  (CARE) had the opportunity to document the profile of informal caregivers aged 55 years and older (hereafter ‘older adult caregivers’), who were caring for persons aged 75 years and older with functional limitations, using data from the Singapore Survey on Informal Caregiving (SSIC) – the findings have been published a CARE research brief[RM2] . We found that older adult caregivers comprised nearly half (46%; 552 of the 1190) of the informal caregivers interviewed in the SSIC, with a third of the older adult caregivers being 70 years and older. The proportion of older adult caregivers with one or more chronic diseases, one or more instrumental activity of daily living limitations, or poor/fair self-rated health increased steeply with age. The proportion with clinically significant depressive symptoms also increased with age, from 15% for those aged 55-59 years to around 30% for those aged 60 years and older. Despite the increase in physical and mental health adversities with age, the average weekly care hours provided by the older adult caregivers did not decline – rather they increased with age, increasing from 36 hours for those aged 55-59 years to 59 hours for those aged 75-79 years. Thus, we found that older adult caregivers, who formed a substantial proportion of informal caregivers (of older adults), had deteriorating health, yet spent long hours, up to 60 hours per week, in caring for their care-recipients.

While our work is informative, much more research needs to be done, locally, regionally, and globally, on older adult informal caregivers to highlight their unique vulnerabilities and strengths, and the heterogeneity within such caregivers and in their caregiving journeys, using quantitative as well as qualitative methodologies. This will aid in development and tailoring of policies and programs that specifically target this important sub-group of informal caregivers.  

[RM1]https://www.duke-nus.edu.sg/care

[RM2]https://www.duke-nus.edu.sg/docs/librariesprovider3/research-policy-brief-docs/a-profile-of-older-caregivers-in-singapore.pdf?sfvrsn=be6b7e59_0