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Advisory bodies, such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK, advocate using preference based instruments to measure the quality of life (QoL) component of the quality-adjusted life year (QALY). Cost per QALY is used to determine cost-effectiveness, and hence funding, of interventions. QALYs allow policy makers to compare the effects of different interventions across different patient groups.

Currently, 5.4 million persons in the USA are diagnosed with dementia, and this number is projected to rise to 7.7 million by the year 2030. Family caregivers provide up to 80% of the care needed by persons with dementia and published work suggests that caring for persons with dementia can be very costly to caregivers' health. This study examined the mediating and the moderating effects of positive cognitions on the relationship between caregiver burden and resourcefulness in 80 caregivers of persons with dementia.

Feminism rather than gerontology characterises this book but the substantive issues lie within the field of gerontology and the shift in the boundaries of paid and unpaid work at the end of the twentieth and in the early twenty-first centuries. Cash payments for care are a possible method of ensuring care and citizenship. The chapters raise issues of long-term care funding, the positions of users, caregivers and care workers in the care relationship, how care work could be professionalised and support for informal carers.

This paper reports the results of the application of the contingent valuation method (CVM) to determine a monetary value of informal care. We discuss the current practice in valuing informal care and a theoretical model of the costs and benefits related to the provision of informal care. In addition, we developed a survey in which informal caregivers' willingness to accept (WTA) to provide an additional hour of informal care was elicited.

Background: older patients are less likely to receive palliative care than younger patients. As patient and primary carer age correlate positively, patterns may be due to carer rather than patient age, and reflect better ability to obtain support among younger carers.

Objective: to investigate how both patient and carer age relate to palliative care use, controlling for relevant variables.

Longitudinal research on caregiver burden related to mental disorders based on representative samples is scarce. Previous results on the development of burden over time are inconsistent. This article aims to establish whether change in mental disorder status in the index persons predicts subjective burden in their spouses in terms of changed mental health over a period of 11 years.

The Health & Social Care (H&SC) Task Force, the membership of which is set out in annex B, was one of four such task forces established to develop proposals for measures to be included in the new Carers’ Strategy . This report comprises proposals developed by the group which were put to the Interdepartmental Group chaired by David Behan, Director-General Social Care, Local Government and Care Partnerships, Department of Health, which oversaw the development of the strategy as a whole.

The views of carers are often overlooked, but the winner of the Cancer Nursing category at the 2005 NT Awards put them at the centre of a project to improve care for patients with lung cancer, reports Clare Lomas. [Introduction]

While policy promotes comprehensive assessment of family career needs and a plan to adequately meet family career needs within palliative care, there is a lack of studies in the Australian context which examine the current type of assessment and types of care provided to family carers.

In the United States and globally, increasing numbers of older parents are living with their adult children. Making the decision to live together requires careful thought and planning; particularly when the decision means the children will be responsible for their elder parents’ care, the physicians of all parties should be consulted. More than one-third of caregivers state that they seek advice from their physician or other clinician when information is needed about this transition.