Leveraging a New National Data Linkage to Examine Caregiving for Older Adults and Its Impacts on Caregivers' Downstream Outcomes

Canadians rely heavily on family and friend caregivers to care for its aging population. Caregiving can be very stressful and at least 1/3 of Canadian caregivers are distressed, which can affect their health and healthcare use in the future. In order to design better services and policies to support caregivers, we need to fill several knowledge gaps, including getting a more holistic and detailed understanding of what caregiving entails and impacts, what caregivers' downstream outcomes are, and which factors (or groups of factors) can increase/reduce negative outcomes, especially during periods of stress like the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, our project has 4 aims: 1.Describe caregiving for older adults in Canada and caregivers' outcomes. 2.Identify factors that influence caregivers' healthcare use and well-being. 3.Assess how outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic differed for different caregivers. 4.Develop a detailed model of caregiving and caregiver outcomes. We will develop a new dataset by linking data from a national survey of caregivers to their records of hospitalization, mortality, and income. We will use various statistical methods to achieve our aims. Our findings will have strong implications for population health surveillance, health systems planning, and developing policies to support caregivers. We will gain a better understanding of what caregiving for older adults involves and how it affects various aspects of the caregiver's life, thus informing policies to support caregivers be more holistic, flexible, and tailored. We will inform caregivers, care providers, and policy makers of factors to target or services to provide that are most effective in reducing bad outcomes, as well as which groups of caregivers are most at risk of having negative outcomes.