Background: The nearly 11 million unpaid caregivers (‘family members or friends’) who provide care to the 5.8 million people living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) in the United States are frequently tasked with substantial and overwhelming care budgeting and planning. Yet, many of these caregivers encounter health system-level and individual-level barriers that make it difficult to carry out care budgeting and planning tasks. System-level barriers include lack of education and training resources and fragmented care services. Several
individual factors including employment status and ethnicity have also been linked to problems with care budgeting and planning. An individual-level factor that is not well understood is the education level of ADRD caregivers.
Objective: This ongoing study is investigating the role of caregiver education level in predicting confidence in ADRD care budgeting and planning.
Methods: Caregivers of people living with ADRD residing in the United States completed the ADRD Caregiver Financial and Legal Planning Survey in 2022. Secondary analyses of cross-sectional data are currently underway. A total of 238 caregivers self-reported their confidence in care budgeting and planning, which was assessed by the following question “How confident are you in knowing about care budgeting and planning (1=not at all confident, 5=extremely confident). Those responding ‘4’ (fairly) or greater will be designated as high confidence. Descriptive statistics were used to examine demographic characteristics of caregivers. Logistic regression analyses will be used to determine the relationship between caregiver education level and confidence in care budgeting and planning while controlling for demographic characteristics.
Results: Our research did not find a casual relationship between education level and confidence in care budgeting and planning. Overall, the majority of caregivers do not have high confidence in care budgeting and planning. As a result, improvement in training resources, health literacy, and numeracy skills are areas of interest for future research.
