Fairfield Cares invites public to take caregiving survey

FAIRFIELD – The local nonprofit organization Fairfield Cares wants the public to know about a survey it is conducting of caregivers and the people who need them.

The group has created both a paper copy and an online version of the survey, which attempts to gauge the need for caregivers among the population and to ask caregivers about help they may need. Vanessa Pohren, a project consultant with Fairfield Cares, said the group has been promoting the survey and collecting surveys since January, and that it will continue to accept them through the end of March.

“For the caregiver survey, we’re asking caregivers if they’ve ever lost wages or cut back on a regular job to take on a caregiving role,” Pohren said. “We’re asking if they’d be interested in a support group for caregivers, and whether they need any training.”

For the separate survey of people who have received care, those people are being asked if they’ve been hospitalized, if they’ve been discharged, if they received proper follow-up consultations and so on.

“We know anecdotally that a lot of people could have used assistance but didn’t qualify because they didn’t meet Medicare guidelines,” Pohren said. “A lot of people aren’t aware of the different services out there, or don’t have the means to go after them.”

Once the group has finished collecting surveys, it will publish a report of its findings and distribute it to local governmental bodies such as the Fairfield City Council, Jefferson County Board of Supervisors, the Department of Public Health and Iowa Commission on Aging. It will also post the report on its website at fairfieldcares.net.

“Not a lot of people think about this until they have to deal with it,” Pohren said about caregiving. “Almost everyone will be a caregiver or will need care at some point in their life.”

The survey can be found on Fairfield Cares’s website, and paper copies can be obtained at places such as Fairfield City Hall, Fairfield Public Library, the Fairfield Community Center, and Revs Health Center, among others.

Pohren noted that data from the American Association of Retired People from 2023 show that Iowa has 330,000 unpaid caregivers, and that about 70 percent of people over the age of 65 will need long-term care.

Caregiving is an especially important topic for Jefferson County residents because it has a higher percentage of elderly residents, and younger residents who are disabled, compared to the state average. Pohren said data from the most recent U.S. Census show that 25.4 percent of Jefferson County’s adult population is 65 years or older compared to just 18.3 percent for the state. Meanwhile, 13 percent of the population under 65 is either temporarily or permanently disabled and in need of caregiving, compared to 8.4 percent for the state.

Pohren said she became interested in the topic of caregivers while working for nearly a decade as a nurse in home health care. In her job with SunnyBrook Home Care, Pohren saw “a lot of people slip through the cracks,” people who needed more assistance in their homes than what a home care agency could provide through their insurance. Some patients needed round-the-clock care, so it was hard for their caregiver to leave them alone even to go to the grocery store, or to get any sort of break at all.

“A lot of times, we saw people who needed assistance with bathing, medication, meal preparation or help with laundry,” Pohren said. “Fairfield Cares started out of a need to address those gaps in care that people who need assistance in homes don’t necessarily have.”

Fairfield Cares was founded in 2017 by Jennifer Hamilton, now the group’s president, as a way of helping people with short-term needs such as recuperating from a surgery or illness. The group helps people who need meals, too, through the service mealtrain.com. The site is useful for parents who have just had a baby, or families who have experienced a sudden emergency, and who need help with their meals. Pohren said if residents are struggling to find help with their meals, Fairfield Cares will send a request to its list of 200 or so volunteers to ask for assistance.

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Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com