When family members and friends begin caregiving for a loved one with dementia, their attention is immediately drawn to how best to manage their person’s day-to-day health and well-being.

What is less apparent is how many health care, legal, financial, social service, and family systems they will need to navigate along the way — and how daunting it can be for those without previous experience.

To address this issue, the National Institute on Aging has awarded a $3.5 million grant to the Emory University Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing to study an online tool’s capacity to increase caregiver mastery.

The five-year R01 grant was awarded to professors Carolyn Clevenger, DNP, GNP-BC, FAANP, FGSA, FAAN, and Ken Hepburn, PhD, FGSA. The program they will be testing employs state-of-the-art, interactive learning methods that can be accessed asynchronously, providing flexible use for busy caregivers to help them understand and master the navigator role in which they find themselves.

With more than 11 million informal caregivers guiding the daily lives, fortunes, and care system interactions of persons living with dementia, providing support is of the utmost importance, noted Clevenger, a gerontological nurse practitioner and founder/director of the Emory Integrated Memory Care Clinic.

“Promoting effective coping behaviors by strengthening caregivers’ capacities for navigating interactions with systems and structures may reduce high levels of caregiver stress,” she adds. “We hope that ensuring that these systems and structures are effectively accessed and deployed will benefit persons with dementia as well.”

Family members and friends are often the core of care that keeps persons with dementia in their community settings — a reality that has both family and societal implications, says Hepburn, a gerontologist and dementia caregiving researcher. “The better-equipped caregivers are…