Financing

This report shows the that majority of unpaid carers are unable to take sufficient breaks and also highlights an unfair and unequal provision of carers’ breaks services across England. The report is based on the results of a survey of over 1,000 carers in the UK and a freedom of information request to local authorities and clinical commissioning groups across England. Only 8 per cent of carers responding to the survey felt they had been able to take sufficient breaks.

Projection models enable users to assess the costs and benefits of changes to long-term services and supports policies and to compare policy options, using a consistent set of underlying assumptions. Outlined are key challenges model developers face, including data limitations, difficulties anticipating potential behavioral responses, the need to assign appropriate benchmarks, the value of family care and intangibles like autonomy and quality of life, and grappling with uncertainty.

Much of the 150million earmarked by the government to help carers never reached them. Where PCTs did pass on funds it has made a crucial difference. The author reports. [Journal abstract]

With the budgetary pressures facing local authorities in England, it is important to identify how better value for money could be achieved from current spending on social care. The drive for efficiencies should not be at the detriment of older people with care and support needs and their families and carers. This document provides 10 ideas to make better use of current social care funding while improving quality of care and experiences for older people and their carers.

Users, carers and the wider public are just as important to the real picture of long-term care provision and funding as local authority and NHS commissioners. So co-ordination is about more than agency structures.

This Viewpoint, written by Caroline Glendinning at the University of York and David Bell at the University of Stirling, draws on the experiences of other countries to argue that social care is a collective, welfare state responsibility rather than an individual, private responsibility.

Other key points include: 

• social care arrangements in many other countries are equal and universal: everyone is eligible regardless of wealth, and people with similar levels of disability receive care no matter where they live;

Our experience of partnership working on a Scottish project on service user and carer involvement in social work education has been a deeply politicising one. First-hand encounters with power enacted at various sites of service user and carer involvement across national, institutional and local university levels have demonstrated to us that 'partnership working that pushes at the orthodox structures of power is difficult' (Barnes et al., 2006, p. 434).

As the number of older persons in need of long-term care increases, efforts to support older persons remaining in their home are intensified in most OECD countries. In this context of ageing in place, there is a movement towards allowing more individual choice for older persons receiving publicly funded long-term care at home. Having more flexibility in terms of how to receive care can increase the older person’s self-determination and that of his/her informal care givers.

This study aims to: estimate the costs borne by families caring for patients with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD); to contextualise results to recent initiative; and consider the methodological problems of estimating costs of care. Semi-structured interviews and a follow-up postal questionnaire, eliciting costs to families both before and after the patient's death, were carried out participants included 19 families of patients with vCJD. Cost profiles were constructed, detailing key time and financial costs associated with their relative's illness and death accursing to families.

Families and carers of drug misuers have been promised more help and support by the Government as part of a major new strategy. Looks at what this may mean to families.