Home & Family

New National Survey: More Than Half of Veterans Are Unaware of Their Housing Benefits and a Quarter Need Financial Help for Home Modifications

Stress – or the body’s response to any demand – may not be all that bad in small doses. It can help us get through a short-term crisis, such as the first few days of a pandemic. But chronic stress -- the ongoing kind, such as weeks’-long interruptions to our normal rhythms due to the coronavirus outbreak -- is the stuff that can be a mental killer.

Texas lawmakers today finalized a measure that gives important new rights to millions of unpaid family caregivers. A priority for AARP, House Bill 2425 (companion to Senate Bill 1417) would help Texans when their loved ones go into the hospital and as they transition home. The legislation goes next to the governor’s desk.

In Texas alone, there are more than 3.4 million unpaid family caregivers, many of whom provide complex medical and nursing tasks for their loved ones, and sometimes without adequate explanation or training. It’s not unusual for their tasks to include managing multiple medications, providing wound care, overseeing special diets, and operating high-tech medical equipment and monitors.

The Texas Senate took a pivotal step toward improving the quality of care in Texas nursing facilities on Wednesday by unanimously approving Senate Bill 932, which seeks to hold nursing home operators accountable for harming residents.

2024 Caregiver Day at the Capitol

A Four-Part Series to Optimize Brain Health

If you have a spouse, sibling, parent, or other loved one in a nursing home, you may be worried about their safety and well-being because of the coronavirus pandemic. AARP has consulted with leading nursing home experts to provide you with some key questions to ask the nursing home:

Carolyn Hartman’s mother, Myrtle Hartman, died last spring after spending eight years in a Central Texas nursing facility.

A bill filed this week in the Texas Senate would ensure that Texans taking care of a loved one released from a hospital or rehabilitation facility would receive caregiver information and training.