Aliyya Swaby
Looney (left) and Bright (center).
At 18 years old, Richard Bright became the primary caretaker of his mother, who was suffering from a chronic lung disease. He was given little instruction on how to help her through daily tasks.
Now a volunteer advocate for AARP, Bright is working to pass a state bill that would require hospitals to make sure caregivers are properly trained and informed before they take their loved ones home or to a facility.
He, other AARP representatives, city officials and Senate President Martin Looney explained the details of the proposed legislation, Senate Bill 290, to a small group at the Atwater Senior Center Friday morning — in the larger context of ensuring seniors are treated fairly in and out of the hospital.
The Caregiver Advise, Record and Enable (CARE) Act was passed last year in Oklahoma and New Jersey and is now being considered in several other states, including Connecticut. Many hospitals do have a “discharge plan,” Looney said, but “it isn’t always uniform and it isn’t always of the same quality.”
Through the CARE Act, each patient would designate a specific person as caregiver and that person would be notified and provided with instructions on how to perform any outpatient care, including dressing wounds, giving injections and managing medication, Looney explained. More than 700,000 people in Connecticut provide this kind of help to their family members or loved ones, he said.
The bill has received “broad-based bipartisan support,” Looney (pictured) said. “I am very confident of its passage this year.”
Bright said AARP held “caregiver listening sessions,” and heard a lot of personal stories from people struggling just as he did at age 18. He said he met a woman whose husband regularly “passed out and hurt himself.” The woman had to administer injections to her husband, something she “was not trained to do.”
Bright said the existing lack of regulation is “setting [caregivers] up to fail.”
The city and Mayor Toni Harp are “fully in support of this” bill, said Martha Okafor (pictured above at right), community services administrator, who represented the mayor at the meeting. “Everybody in the hospital wants to be with someone that care for them,” she said. “It will enable people we love to feel more encouraged and confident.”
Migdala Castro, elderly services director, made sure to explain the bill in Spanish for monolingual Spanish speakers.
