Family Caregiving Support Program Analysis

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Caregiving has become an important aspect of aging in our society. Caregiving for a vulnerable family member can be challenging and demanding. The federal government created a Family Caregiving support program (FCSP) to ensure that all the family caregivers have caregiving assistance to overcome challenges. In this paper, I will be evaluating the Family Caregiving Support Program offered in the Cass county region of North Dakota. The main purpose of an evaluation is to examine the overall strength and weakness of FCSP.
Background
The Family Caregiver Support Program (FCSP) is a federally funded program under the Older American Act (OAA) which work at the state level to provide direct support services to family caregivers of person age 60
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The first strength of Family caregiver support programs is that FCSP does not require any charges to utilize the program. FCSP services are provided at no cost to qualifying people (North Dakota Department of Human Resources, 2012). No cost or income eligibility to utilize the program benefits open the door for all elderly people to enjoy the program benefits, despite their low financial situations. Additionally, FCSP offer education and training services offer. FCSP program provides individual counseling, support groups and training services to meet caregiver, individual needs for assistance (Feinberg & Newman, 2006). Individual counseling can be effective to reduce caregiver stress and, training allows caregiver learn a variety of self-care tools and strategies to reduce their stress, communicate more effectively with family and healthcare providers, deal with difficult feelings, and make tough caregiving decisions. Furthermore, older adults can depend on their family members without feeling burden. There will be less likely for older adults to experience fear being burdened in their family because FCSP provides caregiving assistance to family …show more content…
The weaknesses of this program are lack of public awareness about the programs, failure to address the diverse population and lack of information to clients about other available services. First, Lack of public awareness about the caregiver services is one of the top challenges that need to overcome by FCSP (Feinberg & Newman, 2006). Due to the lack of information and outreach to the public, many families who might benefit from programs and services did not know where to go for help. Second, FCSP should work on creating culturally sensitive services for diverse population. To achieve the equality in service distribution among the diverse population it is important for FCSP to focus on providing culturally appropriate care (Feinberg, Wolkwitz, & Goldstein, 2006). FCSP should pursue more outreach to culturally diverse populations to increase service delivery to ethnic minorities. Tomorrow’s interventions should be directed at enhancing culturally-targeted education and training to a diverse population. Third, FCSP should work to provide information about other services that their client might be eligible. Sometimes older adults who can be eligible for other beneficial services might be lacking particular service due to lack of information. Therefore, including information about other services can