Caregiver Assessment Resources

National Overview of Caregiver Assessment and Relevance to Respite

National Caregiver Support Collaborative

The NCSC Checklist for Caregiver Assessments provides a self-guided roadmap for aging, tribal and kinship networks to advance the use of caregiver assessments in Older Americans Act (OAA) caregiver programs. The checklist aims to fully capture the range of caregivers’ needs, match caregivers to services, and ensure these services effectively address their needs.

T-Care Resources

AARP

Listening to Family Caregivers: The Need to Include Family Caregiver Assessment in Medicaid Home and Community-Based Waiver Programs, 2013

Family Caregiver Alliance

Selected Caregiver Assessment Measures: A Resource Inventory for Practitioners, Family Caregiver Alliance

A systematic and well-designed assessment can help identify a caregiver’s needs and strengths and, in turn, contribute to a plan of care that ensures the well-being of both the caregiver and care recipient.

As health care continues to move into home setting, it is important to assess not only the knowledge, skills and capacity of the caregiver to provide care but also to address caregiver well-being and health in order to prevent more serious health problems for families in the long-term.

Download report .

Caregiver Assessment: Why and What Should We Assess?

As a follow-up to the Caregivers Count Too! Report prepared by the National Center on Caregiving of Family Caregiver Alliance, this is the first of two webinars which focus on the importance of the caregiver assessment as an instrument and a process to better identify caregivers’ needs and form the foundation for an appropriate plan of care.

Watch the webinars.

The session covered:

Benefits of Respite for Family Caregivers
Who, What, Why, When, Where and How Aspects of Assessments
Relevant Assessment Domains
Voice From the Field: A Family Consultant’s Perspective
Updates on Caregiver Assessment Instruments – Where Do We Go From Here?

Mapping Caregiver Needs’ Assessment Tools for Family and Friend Caregivers: A Rapid Scoping Review

This rapid scoping review identified 19 caregiver needs assessment tools and found substantial variation in how they define and measure caregiver support needs, with many focusing on burden or stress rather than explicitly eliciting caregiver-defined needs. Across tools, seven key domains of support needs emerged, but important gaps remain—particularly in areas like autonomy, spiritual support, and routine integration into clinical workflows and electronic records. Overall, the study highlights that existing tools are not well designed for consistent, system-wide use, limiting their ability to support caregiver-centered care and inform timely interventions. Read the full article.

Citation:
Ding, X., Alavi Toussi, R., Dal Pizzol, F. L. F., Grewal, A., Hyde, A., Parmar, J., Anderson, S., & Tandon, P. (2026). Mapping Caregiver Needs’ Assessment Tools for Family and Friend Caregivers: A Rapid Scoping Review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 23(3), 300. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph23030300

Examples of State Caregiver Assessment Tools