The Friends Nobody Wrote Down

Paula Span's latest column counts a caregiver the system barely sees. A University of Michigan study in JAMA Network Open found about 14% of participants identified friends, including neighbors, as caregivers, roughly 2.4 million people nationally. Friends supplied 18 hours of help a month on average, against about 67 hours from family. Two-thirds of them drive.

The people in the story are specific. Patricia Wood, 93, broke her neck in October. Ann Greenwater, 84, has no family beyond a distant nephew. Friends bring lattes, do laundry, pick up prescriptions.

The part families miss is that a friend's help is already part of the care plan, written down or not. When the neighbor who drives to appointments gets sick or moves away, the plan loses a leg overnight, and nobody at the doctor's office knows that person existed. A family caregiver an hour away should know every name on that list, a phone number for each, and what each one actually does.

Write the friends in. in.