English

This publication sets out a vision for giving people approaching the end of life more choice about where they would like to live and die.

Our purpose in this paper is to report on the frustrations and unmet needs of paid, formal caregivers and unpaid, family caregivers who together provide care to adults with disabilities and/or mental health issues. We conducted eight focus group interviews between November 2010 and June 2011 in two large, urban centres and one smaller centre in Western Canada.

Employers are increasingly aware of the need for family-friendly policy and practice to be developed in the workplace in order to support those who have caring responsibilities for older adults, as well as, or instead of, children. A number of factors have contributed to this growing awareness, not least demographic changes, which have resulted in the ageing of Britain’s population, with potentially greater numbers of people needing care and support in old age in the future (Bernard and Phillips, 1998; George, 2001). Alongside this, there are fewer younger people in the population.

Making it Real for Carers explores what each Making it Real theme means to carers and what this might look like in practice. It has been coproduced with carers and organisations including the Carers Trust and ADASS following a series of workshops across England. 

The template below provides a guide to the approach that could be taken when looking at what's working and what needs improving in relation to Making it Real for Carers. Many organisations will have their own business planning processes and frameworks and this can be used as a checklist to inform those.

There has been growing recognition of the important role that carers play in enabling vulnerable adults to remain in the community. Recent legislation has recognised the role of the family carers and encouraged the development of support services. Considerable research has been undertaken to identify the needs and the experiences of the carers in general but little specific attention has focused on older carers. This is despite the fact that they have their own unique needs which may have been hidden in previous research.

Informal carers save the state's health and social care services billions of pounds each year. The stresses associated with caring have given rise to a number of short-term care services to provide respite to carers. The Carers (Recognition & Services) Act of 1995 identified formally for the first time, the important role that unpaid carers provide across the community in Britain.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to analyze the factors that affect the burden of care for primary caregivers of older people during the transition period after discharge from the hospital to home.

METHODS: Using convenience sampling, 95 older patients who had been hospitalized for a hip fracture and their primary caregivers were enrolled. Data pertaining to the burden experienced by the caregivers were collected 1 week and 1 month after discharge from the hospital.

Since the early 1990s, UK social care policy has committed to supporting carers. Legislation (England and Wales) over this time period has recognised the importance of separate carer assessments that take into account an individual's ability and willingness to care. This paper considers carer assessment from the perspective of social care practitioners. It reports on qualitative data from a carer research programme that spans over 20 years (1993 to present) and includes 383 in-depth interviews with social care practitioners across England and Wales.

Integrated care pathways (ICPs) are prearranged processes of care that are being increasingly used to deliver mental health services. The literature to date reveals relatively little about service user and carer experience in relation to their use. This study was completed as part of case study research and focused on the experiences of service users and carers gathered using focus groups, as a unit of analysis.

Successive government policies have highlighted the need to inform and involve carers fully in the hospital discharge process. However, some research suggests that many carers feel insufficiently involved and unsupported in this process.