The study, led by Kristina M. Kokorelias and colleagues including Caillie Gregory, Mikayla Speranza, Nira Rittenberg, Suzanne Smith-Bayley, Monique A. M. Gignac, Gary Naglie, and Jill I. Cameron, set out to understand how regulated healthcare professionals experience and manage the simultaneous demands of professional practice and family caregiving, and how those demands ripple back into their well-being and their work. The researchers deliberately looked beyond the physicians and nurses who dominate the existing literature, recruiting twenty participants from a range of regulated professions across Ontario. Between 2021 and 2024, each participant took part in a semi-structured interview designed to draw out the texture of their lived experience: how they came to assume caregiving responsibilities, what those responsibilities looked like day to day, and how the two halves of their lives collided or reinforced one another.

The team used a qualitative descriptive approach and analyzed the interviews through reflexive thematic analysis, a method in which researchers iteratively code the data, generate candidate themes, and refine them in relation to the entire dataset while remaining alert to how their own perspectives shape interpretation. Rather than testing predetermined hypotheses, reflexive thematic analysis lets patterns emerge from the accounts themselves. From the twenty interviews, two overarching themes crystallized. The first concerned why these professionals assumed caregiving roles in the first place. The second concerned the impacts of carrying both roles at once, with consequences that ran in both directions, from professional life into caregiving and from caregiving back into professional life.

The reasons participants gave for becoming their family’s caregiver fell into a striking pattern. Because they were healthcare professionals, relatives consistently treated them as the most capable person in the family, the one who could interpret a confusing diagnosis, question a discharge plan, spot a medication error, or know which questions to ask a specialist. Clinical expertise, in other words, did not merely qualify them to provide care; it effectively assigned them the job. Layered on top of this expertise-driven expectation were strong familial and cultural obligations, the sense that caring for aging parents is simply what a good son or daughter does. For many participants, these two forces compounded each other. They could not plausibly claim they did not know how to help, and they could not plausibly claim they should not help. The result was a caregiving role that was assumed almost by default, before any deliberate decision had been made.

That expertise was a genuine asset, and the study does not minimize this. Participants described how their clinical knowledge smoothed navigation through a fragmented long-term care system, sharpened their advocacy on behalf of their parents, and supported informed decision-making at critical junctures. Where another family member might accept the first available bed in a care home, a healthcare professional might recognize the questions that determine whether that bed is appropriate. Where another caregiver might be intimidated by medical jargon, these participants could translate it in real time. In this sense, the dual role could be efficient and even empowering, allowing them to secure better care for their aging relatives than they might otherwise have managed.

But the same knowledge raised the stakes of everything. Because they understood what good care looked like, participants reported feeling responsible for ensuring it, and family members’ expectations rose accordingly. When a parent’s condition deteriorated, the professional in the family was presumed to have answers. When the system failed, they were presumed to be able to fix it. The study found that this heightened sense of responsibility carried a distinct emotional weight: these caregivers could not seek refuge in ignorance. They knew precisely what was at stake in every clinical decision, and that awareness made each compromise in their parent’s care feel personal. Expertise, the researchers conclude, is a double-edged instrument in family caregiving, facilitating navigation while intensifying burden.

The second major theme mapped the consequences of juggling both roles, and they were substantial. Many participants described burnout, the erosion of personal time, and persistent feelings of guilt, guilt toward their patients when family emergencies pulled their attention away, and guilt toward their parents when clinical duties did the same. Divided attention emerged as a recurring experience, with participants describing days in which they were physically present at work while mentally monitoring a parent’s situation, or vice versa. The strain was not merely psychological. Some participants reported reducing their working hours, and some described stepping back from career development opportunities, promotions, or specialized training because the dual load left no room for professional growth. For a healthcare system already stretched thin, the implication is sobering: the very people most equipped to care for an aging population are, in significant numbers, quietly scaling back their own careers to do so.

The picture was not uniformly bleak, and the study’s findings on workplace context carry practical weight. Participants whose employers offered flexibility, in scheduling, in the ability to respond to family emergencies, in the understanding of supervisors, reported that some of the worst pressures of dual caregiving were mitigated. Professional networks also helped, giving caregiver-participants trusted colleagues to consult when a parent faced a clinical problem outside their own specialty. And in a finding that complicates any simple narrative of burden, many participants said that caregiving had made them better at their jobs. Walking the patient’s side of the bed, as it were, deepened their empathy, sharpened their communication skills, and gave them a firsthand understanding of what patients and families actually endure inside the system. Caregiving, in this sense, functioned as an unplanned, unpaid professional development program, enriching clinical practice even as it drained personal reserves.

The researchers argue that these findings point toward concrete organizational action. Targeted supports for healthcare professional caregivers, flexible work policies designed with caregiving realities in mind, and tailored interventions that acknowledge the specific dynamics of expert caregivers are needed to sustain both the well-being of these workers and their continued participation in the workforce. The alternative, allowing dual-role caregivers to burn out, reduce hours, or exit the profession entirely, would compound the workforce shortages that health systems worldwide are already facing, precisely as demographic aging accelerates demand for care on every front. Supporting this group is not a niche wellness initiative; it is a resilience strategy for the healthcare system itself.

The study also fills a genuine gap in the science of caregiving. Family caregiving research has grown enormously in recent decades, driven by recognition that unpaid caregivers sustain health systems at enormous personal cost, yet healthcare professionals who are also family caregivers have been studied mainly, and narrowly, as physicians and nurses. By including regulated professionals across a range of disciplines, the Ontario team demonstrates that the dual-role experience is widespread and that its dynamics, expertise-driven expectations, cultural obligation, workplace flexibility as a protective factor, and caregiving as a source of professional growth, are likely relevant far beyond the twenty people interviewed. As populations age, the number of clinicians caring for aging parents will only grow. Understanding their experience, the authors conclude, is critical to strengthening caregiver support systems and to building a healthcare workforce capable of withstanding the demographic pressures ahead.

Subject of Research: Dual-role family caregiving among regulated healthcare professionals caring for aging adults in Ontario

Article Title: Balancing caregiving and professional roles: A qualitative study of Ontario regulated healthcare professionals caring for aging adults

Article References: Kokorelias, K. M., Gregory, C., Speranza, M., Rittenberg, N., Smith-Bayley, S., Gignac, M. A. M., Naglie, G., & Cameron, J. I. (2026). Balancing caregiving and professional roles: A qualitative study of Ontario regulated healthcare professionals caring for aging adults. PLOS Aging and Health, 1(1), e0000016. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.page.0000016

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.page.0000016

Keywords: family caregiving, healthcare professionals, aging adults, qualitative research, burnout, work-life balance, Ontario, reflexive thematic analysis, caregiver burden, workforce retention, healthcare system resilience, workplace flexibility