Do you want to recognize, engage, and support family caregivers as essential partners in care?
Join our Community of Practice—a space to connect with peers, learn from experts, and share strategies for embedding caregiver partnership into everyday practice.
Calgary is emerging as a leader in practical, relationship-driven integrated care. In this Caregiver-Centered Care Champions Community of Practice session, four frontline innovators show how health and community teams are working together to create smoother transitions, stronger caregiver partnerships, and better support for older adults across settings.
Together, they represent programs that routinely serve the same older adults and family caregivers—yet historically operated in silos. This session shows how Calgary teams are closing those gaps through shared patient journeys, warm handoffs between hospital and community, caregiver needs assessments built into geriatric practice, and the essential roles of social work and community navigation.
Participants will hear how Virtual Home Hospital, Specialized Geriatrics, and Carya’s Aging Well supports are aligning their work so caregivers are not left carrying the full mental load of navigating multiple systems. The panel will surface real stories of caregiver burden, preference, and resilience—and reveal what caregivers say they need when given structured ways to voice it.
This session offers a grounded, honest look at what integration really requires: strong relationships, consistent communication across systems that don’t share an EMR, early caregiver identification, and warm, relational transitions rather than handing people a phone number to call.
You will leave with practical insights, concrete examples, and inspiration for how health care and community care can work together to support older adults and their family caregivers—no new funding required, just collaboration, clarity, and shared purpose.
Over 62% of caregivers are employed, often balancing demanding jobs with the equally demanding role of caregiving. From our continuing education work with over 1,000 providers, we found that more than half (51.7%) are also family caregivers. In some healthcare settings where they have many experienced health providers, the percentages can be as high as 73% and 82%.
This session highlighted innovative approaches and practical solutions to support the double-duty caregivers in our workplaces.
Participants left with practical strategies and tools to help caregivers navigate health, social, and community resources more effectively.
Three organizations discussed how to build and sustain effective caregiver peer support groups, highlighting what works and what to avoid.
