Social care online

The aim of this document is to help local mental health services develop support services for carers of people with mental health problems. It contains guidance on developing and sustaining mental health carer support services and also includes a sample job description for carer support workers. The guidance should be read in conjunction with Standard Six (Caring for Carers) of the Mental Health National Service Framework (MHNSF) and guidance on implementation of the Carers and Disabled Children Act 2000.

The Essence of Care benchmarks are a tool to help healthcare practitioners take a patient-focused and structured approach to sharing and comparing practice. There are 12 benchmarks in total. This document outlines the benchmarks for communication, in order to support people and their carers to experience effective communication.

Statistics on service provision in Scotland to older people, people with learning disabilities, people with mental health problems, disabled people, carers and other users. Provides figures on domiciliary care, day care, residential care, private nursing homes, hospitals and special needs housing for each user group.

Original document (pdf) on the Scottish Government website.

This paper seeks to highlight the impact of the Carers (Recognition and Services) Act of 1995 on carers of people with learning disabilities. It draws on research conducted in the south west between 1997 and 1999, which examined the views and experiences of carers who had an assessment of their needs, together with those of the person they care for and the professional conducting the assessment. It concludes that the Carers Act is not widely used, or understood, by this group of carers.

The evidence to the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights paints an often harrowing picture of neglect, abuse and the denial of fundamental human rights to adults living with learning disabilities in the UK. Evidence received by the Committee reveals that people with learning disabilities are more vulnerable to abuse and are less likely to understand their fundamental human rights, including to be treated with dignity and respect by public authorities.

Users, carers and the wider public are just as important to the real picture of long-term care provision and funding as local authority and NHS commissioners. So co-ordination is about more than agency structures.

This paper describes a teaching and learning initiative developed in a UK social work programme that has involved carers, service users, academic social work staff and practitioners. Post‐graduate student social workers spend 24 hours in agreed periods with family carers or people who use social work services. The paper explains the origins of this initiative, rooted in a model of service user and carer involvement established over a number of years within the social work programme at the University of Dundee, Scotland.

Background Even at the first episode of psychosis, high expressed emotion (EE) characterises over half of patient–carer relationships. This study compared a carer appraisal model of EE with the ability of illness factors to predict EE at the first episode.

Aims To investigate the utility of a carer appraisal model of EE in first-episode psychosis.

Method We compared high- and low-EE carers of people who had first-episode psychosis (n=46).

Norwich: a ‘coffee morning’ initiative aimed to give people with dementia and carers the ordinary social opportunities they were missing. It has succeeded and also brought many further benefits, as Judith Farmer explains

In July 2010, the Department of Health published a call for views on the key priorities, supported wherever possible by evidence of good practice that will have the greatest impact on improving carers’ lives in the next four years. In total, 764 responses were received.