The Family Caregiver Support Program in Florida funds respite through ElderSource — here is what it covers in Jacksonville, the state programs that sit alongside it, and how the waitlist actually works.
By Jacksonville Senior Advisor Care Team · September 9, 2026
The Family Caregiver Support Program is the Florida delivery of a federal program authorized under Title III-E of the Older Americans Act, commonly called the National Family Caregiver Support Program. It is administered statewide by the Florida Department of Elder Affairs and delivered locally through Florida's eleven Area Agencies on Aging. For Jacksonville and the surrounding region, that agency is ElderSource, the Area Agency on Aging and Aging and Disability Resource Center for Northeast Florida, serving Duval, Clay, St. Johns, Nassau, and Baker counties. The program exists for an unusual reason within the aging services system: the person it is designed to help is not the older adult but the unpaid family member doing the caregiving. That framing changes what it will and will not pay for, and it is the single most common source of confusion when a Jacksonville family first calls about a respite grant.
In practice the program funds a mix of services rather than writing checks to families. The core categories are information about available resources, assistance connecting to those resources, individual counseling and caregiver support groups, caregiver training, supplemental services such as incontinence supplies or a grab bar, and — the piece most families actually call about — respite care that gives the caregiver a break. Respite under this program can be delivered in the home by a paid aide, in an adult day center for a block of hours, or occasionally as a short overnight stay in a licensed facility. What the program will not do is provide ongoing long-term custodial care, pay a family member as the caregiver, or fund a permanent move into assisted living. Those goals route to different programs entirely, and a caregiver who understands that distinction up front will spend far less time on the phone.
The Family Caregiver Support Program is rarely the only door available, and in Northeast Florida it is often not the right one. Florida operates several state-funded programs through the same Area Agency on Aging network, and ElderSource screens callers against all of them at once rather than making a family apply separately to each. The Alzheimer's Disease Initiative, usually abbreviated ADI, is specifically for caregivers of a person with Alzheimer's disease or a related dementia, and respite is its central service. For a Jacksonville family caring for someone with a diagnosed dementia, ADI is frequently the stronger match because eligibility is anchored to the diagnosis rather than to a broader frailty score. Community Care for the Elderly, or CCE, funds a wider basket of in-home services — homemaker help, personal care, chore services — for adults sixty and older who are functionally impaired and at risk of nursing home placement.
Two smaller programs are worth knowing by name because they are easy to miss. Home Care for the Elderly, or HCE, provides a modest monthly subsidy to a caregiver who is maintaining an older adult in a private home rather than a facility, with the amount set at the state level and adjusted for the level of need. RELIEF — Respite for Elders Living in Everyday Families — is a volunteer-based respite program that sends trained volunteers into the home for short periods, and because it does not depend on paid staffing it sometimes has capacity when the funded programs do not. Separately, if the older adult is already enrolled in Florida's Statewide Medicaid Managed Care Long-Term Care program, respite is a covered service within that plan and the family should raise it with the plan's case manager first. Sunshine Health, Humana, Simply Healthcare, UnitedHealthcare Community Plan, Aetna Better Health, Florida Community Care and Molina all operate in the Northeast Florida region.
Every one of these programs is entered through the same front door. A Jacksonville caregiver calls the Elder Helpline at 1-888-242-4464, or ElderSource locally at (904) 391-6699, and asks to be screened for caregiver support and respite. There is no application form to download and no packet to assemble in advance. The screening itself is a structured telephone interview built around a Department of Elder Affairs instrument known as the 701S, which asks about the older adult's ability to handle activities of daily living, cognitive status, living situation, informal support, nutritional risk, and recent hospitalizations. It also asks about the caregiver — hours of care provided, employment status, and caregiver strain — because in this program the caregiver's situation is part of the eligibility picture, not background information.
The screening produces a priority score, and that score determines position on what Florida calls the Assessed Priority Consumer List, or APCL. This is the part families are least prepared for. These are capped, appropriation-funded programs rather than entitlements, which means a household can be fully eligible and still wait, sometimes for many months, until funding is released for their priority band. Nothing about a Jacksonville address changes that; the constraint is statewide. Two practical consequences follow. First, call and get screened as early as possible, even if the situation feels manageable today, because the clock only starts at the screening. Second, call ElderSource back whenever circumstances materially worsen — a fall, a hospitalization, a dementia diagnosis, the loss of a second caregiver — because a rescreen can move the priority score, and the agency has no way to know about the change unless someone tells them.
Approved respite hours are delivered by contracted providers, and the practical experience differs noticeably across the five counties ElderSource covers. In the urban core of Duval County — Riverside, Avondale, San Marco, Mandarin, Arlington, Southside, Baymeadows — in-home aide coverage and adult day center capacity are both comparatively deep, and a caregiver is more likely to be offered a genuine choice of provider and schedule. Adult day programs in particular tend to be the most efficient use of a limited respite allocation, because a single day covers six to eight hours where the same funding might buy only three or four hours of one-on-one in-home care. Families in Jacksonville Beach, Atlantic Beach and Neptune Beach generally draw on the same Duval provider network, though travel time can narrow the list of agencies willing to staff a short shift.
Coverage thins as you move outward. In Clay County — Orange Park, Fleming Island, Middleburg, Green Cove Springs — and in St. Johns County toward St. Augustine, Ponte Vedra Beach, Nocatee and World Golf Village, in-home providers exist but scheduling is tighter and short shifts are harder to fill. Nassau County families in Fernandina Beach, Amelia Island, Yulee and Callahan, and Baker County families around Macclenny, face the thinnest network of all, and rural distance is the binding constraint rather than program eligibility. If you live in one of these areas, ask ElderSource directly which providers are actually accepting new respite referrals in your ZIP code before you build a plan around a specific weekly schedule, and be willing to take longer blocks less often rather than short blocks weekly. A caregiver who banks respite into a single full day each month often gets more real recovery from it than one who takes two hours at a time.
Respite is a pressure valve, not a care plan. It is designed for a situation that is sustainable but exhausting, and it works well in that band. It works poorly when the underlying care need has outgrown what one household can safely provide — when transfers are no longer safe for either person, when nighttime wandering means nobody is sleeping, when medication management has become genuinely complex, or when the caregiver's own health is deteriorating. Those signals are worth naming honestly rather than absorbing, because continuing past them tends to end in an emergency department at two in the morning rather than in a planned move. Northeast Florida families who reach that point commonly go through a hospital discharge planner at Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville, Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, UF Health Jacksonville, Ascension St. Vincent's, Orange Park Medical Center or Flagler Health+/UF Health St. Johns, which is a workable but stressful way to make a major decision.
The better sequence is to use the respite window to do the research you cannot do while providing hands-on care. Florida licenses assisted living facilities under Chapter 429, Part I of the Florida Statutes and Rule 59A-36 of the Florida Administrative Code, with the Agency for Health Care Administration as regulator; there is no separate memory care license in Florida, so a community serving residents with dementia operates on a standard ALF license plus an Extended Congregate Care, Limited Nursing Services or Limited Mental Health endorsement. Every one of those licenses and every inspection report is public and searchable on Florida Health Finder. It is also worth asking ElderSource during the same call whether a CARES assessment is appropriate, since that assessment is the gateway to Medicaid long-term care eligibility and takes time to complete. Starting that process while respite is in place is far easier than starting it from a hospital bed.
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