By Laurel White
A School of Education faculty member will help lead a five-year, nationwide project aimed at improving research, data, and evidence-based practices related to family and other care partners.
Beth Fields, an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology, is one of the leaders of a project spearheaded by the National Alliance for Caregiving. The project, which received $2 million from the federal government earlier this year, will examine ways to improve how research about care partners is developed, conducted, shared, and implemented across the United States.
According to the National Alliance for Caregiving, a national advocacy organization, 53 million Americans provide unpaid care to family members, friends, and loved ones who are aging or who are living with a serious medical condition, illness, or disability.
“Data on the experiences and needs of this growing community is fragmented, inconsistent, and homogenous,” the group said in a press release about the project.
Fields says her work will help assess the state of existing research about caregiving, as well as how health care clinicians and staff are currently involving care partners in their treatment plans and how different family members and friends are experiencing the health care system. Her expertise on screening tools that help hospitals assess what support care partners may need to best serve their loved ones will be crucial in the project.
“I’ve been a part of a few projects that really try to help translate research into health care policy,” Fields said. “And to really move the policy needle forward, we need to have high-quality, inclusive, and consistent research data. I am excited to have this opportunity to continue to work on building this data infrastructure and better support care partners.”
As part of the project, Fields and her colleagues will also develop a series of webinars that will help various caregiving advocates implement and scale different evidence-based interventions. This information will go out to care partners as well as researchers, advocacy and caregiving groups, policymakers, community service organizations, and healthcare and service providers. UW–Madison’s Dissemination & Implementation Launchpad, a tool provided by the campus’ Institute for Clinical and Translational Research that helps launch health-related solutions into practice, will be consulted in this process.
Other collaborators on the project include researchers and staff from USAging, Emory University, the University of Pittsburgh National Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Family Support, and Ujima United, LLC.
Fields says her perspective as an occupational therapist will also enrich and inform her work on the project.
“Occupational therapists bring a different perspective, encouraging people to think about complex problems like caregiving more holistically,” she said. “I look forward to bringing that to the table in this work.”
The federal funding for the project is coming from the Administration for Community Living, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The funding is part of a larger, $20 million initiative led by the division to support its National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers.