Put a number on your care.
“How is she?” takes forty minutes to answer honestly. This is the short one: Mom is a KS7.
One number, 1 to 10, for how much care you are actually giving. Not how ill they are. How much of it lands on you: the hours, the nights, whether you can leave the house.
Private. Only you can see your answers and your score.
It measures the work, not the illness
Two people looking after someone with the same diagnosis can be living completely different lives. This is about yours.
The hours
Washing, dressing, feeding, lifting. What you actually do with your hands, on an ordinary day rather than your worst one.
The nights
How often you are up, how many times, and whether you are sleeping in your own bed or in a chair beside theirs.
Whether you can leave
The difference between somebody who can go to the shop and somebody who cannot, which is the biggest difference there is.
Why there is a number at all
Every scale that exists measures one of two things. Katz and Barthel measure what the person being cared for can still do for themselves. The Zarit Burden Interview measures how the caregiver feels about it, in twenty-two questions scored out of eighty-eight.
Neither answers the question people are actually asked, which is how bad is it. So this measures the work: hours, nights, whether they can be left, and how much of it lands on one pair of hands.
Not a diagnosis and not medical advice. It describes your week, not a medical condition.
Five minutes, and you have a number.
Private. Only you can see your answers and your score.