The Comprehensive Caregiving Program Audit
A four-framework evaluation that tells you exactly which parts of the family caregiver experience your assessment, program or tool serves and which parts it leaves with zero coverage.
Your benefit utilization number can't tell you why it's low.
Family caregivers don't skip an EAP, a respite program, or a support line for only one reason. Some don't trust it. Some want it but can't get through the access process. Those opposing problems require different fixes. Without the family caregiver's experience in mind during the design, you'll overlook what could stop program utilization without offering insights into why.
Most caregiving programs are also built around a narrow, task-based definition of caregiving — driving to appointments, managing medications. That definition misses where family caregivers actually spend their energy. Our data about the Nine Domains of Caregiving shows a consistent theme: Being, Sustaining, and Assessing are now the domains family caregivers select most, and yet most programs overlook how to serve family caregivers within these domains.
One audit. Four frameworks. A complete picture.
The Comprehensive Caregiving Program Audit doesn't evaluate your program against a single checklist. It runs your program through all four of Denise Brown's proprietary frameworks together so a gap isn't just identified, it's diagnosed by type.
Six Caregiving Stages™
Does the program account for where a family caregiver is emotionally — from Expectant through Godspeed Caregiver™ — or does it treat every caregiver as if she's in the same place?
19 Caregiving Systems™
Which of the systems she must navigate — Financial, Legal, Medical, Workplace, Technology, and more — does this program actually help her navigate? Which is she still left to manage alone?
14 Caregiving Fatigues™
Does the program address the specific kind of exhaustion she's experiencing — Decision Fatigue, Grief Fatigue, Worry Fatigue, Loneliness Fatigue — or generic stress relief that misses what's actually depleting her?
9 Domains of You™
Which domains of her caregiving work — Advocating, Assessing, Being, Communicating, Deciding, Managing, Planning, Providing, Sustaining — does the program serve? Which does it leave with zero coverage?
It doesn't just say a program has a gap. It says what kind of gap — and for whom.
Two ways to put the audit to work
A program audit and an assessment audit ask the same underlying question: Does this serve the family caregiver, or does it just measure her? We start with these two questions and offer guidance to build a tool that offers insights to connect family caregivers with the help and support appropriate for each situation.
Hire a Certified Caregiving Consultant
Certified Caregiving Consultants (CCCs), trained in all four frameworks, conduct the audit of your program, including an employer EAP, a vendor solution, a nonprofit respite service, a state waiver program, a health system's caregiver support line, an insurance benefit. They map your program's actual coverage across stages, systems, fatigues, and domains, and return a clear picture of what's load-bearing, what's redundant, and what's missing entirely.
Hire Family Caregivers to Audit Your Assessment
Before a survey, intake form, or burden scale is used in practice, family caregivers review it directly — not as subjects, but as evaluators. They tell you what it gets right, what it overlooks, what it asks of someone in a way no professional designer would catch, and how it will feel to fill out. No tool should reach a family caregiver's hands before a family caregiver has reviewed it.
The principle behind both services
For 46 years, the field has built assessments and handed them to family caregivers without ever asking a family caregiver whether the assessment itself was any good. That has to change.
Tools and assessments must be evaluated by family caregivers before they can be used in practice.
Not after launch. Not through a satisfaction survey collected once it's already in the field. Before. A family caregiver's review of an assessment is not a focus group nicety. It is the same kind of validation step every other field treats as non-negotiable, applied to the population the tool is actually for.
Who the audit is built for
Any organization that has built something for family caregivers without a framework for evaluating whether it serves the full experience.
Know what your program actually covers.
Whether it's a benefit, a vendor solution, a program, or an assessment, find out which parts of the family caregiver experience it serves and which it's been missing all along.
