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Background: Despite evidence for early integration of palliative care for people with advanced cancer and their families, patterns of late engagement continue. Prior research has focused on health professionals’ attitudes to palliative care with few studies exploring the views of patients and their carers. Aim: To explore initial perceptions of palliative care when this is first raised with patients with advanced cancer and their families in Australian settings.

Background: In the Scandinavian countries and elsewhere, family care is important as a complement for older people in the professional care system. Better understanding of this role could lead to better cooperation between professionals and family carers and better use of family carers as a resource in care for older people. Aim: The aim of this study was to explore experiences of the role of family carers of older people in need of services and therefore to increase our understanding of this role.

Background A diagnosis of serious mental illness can impact on the whole family. Families informally provide significant amounts of care but are disproportionately at risk of carer burden when compared to those supporting people with other long-term conditions. Shared decision making (SDM) is an ethical model of health communication associated with positive health outcomes; however, there has been little research to evaluate how routinely family is invited to participate in SDM, or what this looks like in practice.

Introduction: Informal caregivers play a pivotal role in supporting patients approaching the end of life. The Carer Support Needs Assessment Tool (CSNAT) is designed to facilitate person-centred assessment and support through a process that is practitioner-facilitated, but carer-led. This study explored practitioners’ experiences of implementing the CSNAT in palliative homecare. Methods: We conducted qualitative interviews/focus groups with 20 practitioners in one UK hospice homecare service (18 nurses, two healthcare assistants) before and after the implementation of the CSNAT.

Background: Most people with stroke in India have no access to organised rehabilitation services. The effectiveness of training family members to provide stroke rehabilitation is uncertain. Our primary objective was to determine whether family-led stroke rehabilitation, initiated in hospital and continued at home, would be superior to usual care in a low-resource setting. Methods: The Family-led Rehabilitation after Stroke in India (ATTEND) trial was a prospectively randomised open trial with blinded endpoint done across 14 hospitals in India.

OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to discover the characteristics of informal caregivers of elderly patients; to determine the socioeconomic, psychological, and physical consequences facing informal caregivers; and to measure their burdens and needs. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This study was a cross-sectional survey of informal caregivers of elderly patients. Participants were recruited from different hospitals and primary care clinics in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. For an intended sample size of 384 caregivers, a multistage sampling was used.

Healthcare policies often state that complex conditions are to be treated outside hospital in various forms of public-private partnership. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ( COPD) is a progressive illness that includes episodes of serious acute exacerbations characterised by extreme breathlessness. There is limited knowledge about COPD exacerbations from the perspective of family caregivers and implications of the changing boundary between hospital care and care at home.

This article draws on research with children who provide care for parents with serious mental health problems and signals ongoing research that uses photographic participation methods with these groups of vulnerable children.

The article reviews the report "National Mental Health Development Unit 2010" highlighting the importance of involving carers particularly in crisis resolution and home treatment teams (CRHT), in managing medicines during a mental health crisis. The authors note the report's recommendation of developing training packages to help carers understand issues and enhance their understanding of mental health conditions and treatment options. They also recommend investigating the needs of young carers.

This paper provides a critical assessment of the family-friendly reform of employment law in the UK. It begins with the analysis of the EU policies on work-life balance as the important context of the reform in the UK. The second part of the paper provides and outline of the family-friendly provisions introduced by the Labour and Coalition Governments between 1997 and 2015 and investigates the rationale behind the reform. The paper questions the consistency of the approach to the family-friendly reform of employment law adopted by the Labour and Coalition governments.