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The paper examines trends in the probability of providing intense care for older parents over the fifteen years between 1985 and 2000, and asks what would happen to the numbers of people providing care to older parents if these trends were to continue in the coming decades. Because the present study is based on an analysis of past trends in provision of informal care, it allows for some key assumptions underlying the projections of informal care in future years to be examined empirically.

This study investigates whether men and women in caring occupations experience more negative job-related feelings at the end of the day compared to the rest of the working population. The data are from Wave Nine of the British Household Panel Survey (1999) where respondents were asked whether, at the end of the working day, they tended to keep worrying or have trouble unwinding, and the extent to which work left them feeling exhausted or “used up.” Their responses to these questions were used to develop ordinal dependent variables.

The incorporation of informal care into economic evaluations of health care is troublesome. The debate focuses on the valuation of time spent on informal caregiving, while time measurement, a related and may be even a more important issue, tends to be neglected. Valid time measurement is a necessary condition for the valuation of informal care. In this paper, two methods of time measurement are compared and evaluated: the diary, which is considered the gold standard, and the recall method, which is applied more often.

This paper outlines two challenges to community nurses as they work with unpaid carers. These reflect a changing culture in the way that healthcare will be delivered in the coming decade. The first of these challenges is a shift towards focusing on outcomes for both service users and adult carers. Outcomes evidence the impact a service has on a person's life. The second is the increasing focus on the concept of carers as partners in care. 

Research has been undertaken to look at how well social care and health organisations involve adult carers in service planning and delivery. This article concludes that while some carers are involved at a strategic level, carers are most dissatisfied about their involvement in individual assessment processes and outcomes. [Abstract]

This article reviews current policies and their impact on carers' lives, and highlights the potential limitations of a more personalised approach to care. Using some key research findings and illustrative case studies, the article argues that we should build on the achievements of the personalisation reforms, but not limit our ambition to offering individuals more choice and control over their services. Instead, there should be a focus on individuals achieving ordinary life chances and families achieving emotional and financial sustainability.

This article investigates care provided to parents and parents-in-law by mid-life adults with dependent children at home. Data from the General Household Survey are used first to estimate the prevalence of this 'two-way' care over the past decade, and second to develop forecasts of two-way care for a generation of women who have just finished their childbearing years. Having a higher education qualification is associated with later ages both of caring for parents and of having children at home.

This article presents an adaptation of the Family Management Style Framework (FMSF)—a well-established framework of family response to chronic condition care of children—to families caring for older adults with dementia. Using the FMSF to better understand how families manage dementia care can provide clinicians with insights on how to work effectively with families.

Purpose – Through consultation with people living with dementia and carers, this paper aims to identify skills that patients and carers feel need to be developed in the workforce. This work is part of a project to develop competencies for the West Midlands dementia workforce.

Respite care or ‘short breaks’ are currently heavily promoted as services to support older people and their carers. However, uptake of such services can be limited and there is a need to design models which are more flexible and responsive, and also reflect the ethos of personcentred care, which is currently one of the main drivers of health and social care policy in the UK. This paper describes the rationale for, and the philosophy behind, a new service for people with dementia and their carers recently established in Sheffield which provides respite care in the person's own home.