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This work includes foreword by Ian Botham, OBE, former England Cricket Captain and father of a daughter with Type 1 Diabetes. This groundbreaking book reveals how science and medicine have traditionally tried to make diabetes simple and orderly, despite its obvious messiness and complexity. The result has left patients, carers and health professionals confused and frustrated. Using complexity science, "Riding the Diabetes Rollercoaster" provides a radical new approach to understanding and managing diabetes that embraces its uncertainties and challenges.

This document has been written to act as a resource for all those involved in developing or providing online services for carers and their families. Many organisations and local authorities are currently exploring how the internet can be used to reach more carers and to provide services more effectively. This guide offers advice and direction on the creation and expansion of websites and other online services for carers, based on the experiences of providers and the views of carers themselves.

Background. In most economically developed countries, patients, their informal and professional carers and policy makers are calling for more care in the community.

Objectives. To involve patients with cancer, and their carers, in designing a framework for providing effective cancer care in primary care.

Methods. Two discussion groups comprising 18 people with current cancer and carers met monthly over a year in the south of Scotland.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: To explore and understand the experience of new informal caregivers in Italy during the transition from hospital to home.

BACKGROUND: Frequent patient discharge into the home environment has lead to a significant increase in postdischarge care being provided by family caregivers. The transition period in particular is seen as a period of great significance, as caregivers may be unprepared and concerned as to the amount of care required by the recipient.

We conducted a mixed-methods knowledge synthesis to assess the effectiveness of interventions to improve caregivers' involvement in decision making with seniors, and to describe caregivers' experiences of decision making in the absence of interventions. We analyzed forty-nine qualitative, fourteen quantitative, and three mixed-methods studies. The qualitative studies indicated that caregivers had unmet needs for information, discussions of values and needs, and decision support, which led to negative sentiments after decision making.

The Access Initiative is run by the Minority Ethnic Carers of Older People Project in partnership with Edinburgh Council, West Lothian Council, minority ethnic carers, and older people. Its twin aims are to give carers from Edinburgh's south Asian and Chinese communities a break from caring and to provide culturally competent services for older members of the family who need care. [Introduction]

As more people are living longer this growing number of older people means an increase in mental health problems. Twenty-five per cent of people over 85 develop dementia and between ten and sixteen per cent of those over 65 develop clinical depression. In addition, people who developed severe and enduring mental health problems such as schizophrenia when young are now growing older (Audit Commission, 2000). Most people with dementia live in the community. About half are cared for at home by a family carer, usually a spouse or adult child (Keady & Nolan, 1995).

This paper reviews the challenges faced by unpaid family carers and the current support and services available to them. It argues that current carer support should be built on and presents the evidence for doing so, including evidence of the opportunities to make substantial savings in residential care costs. The paper suggests a new way in which proposed resource allocation and personal budget systems could be developed in order to sustain caring, avoiding the risk of a new perverse incentive to families to end caring roles.

The overall aim of the A.C.T.I.O.N. research project (Assisting Carers using Telematic Interventions to meet Older person's Needs) is to maintain or enhance the autonomy, independence and quality of life of frail older and disabled people and their family carers by providing information, advice and support in the home. The authors report on the first phase of evaluation conducted using a case-study approach to test the A.C.T.I.O.N. system in several family carers' homes in Sheffield, England.