carers

Increasing proportions of men and women are combining family (including care-giving) and work responsibilities in later life; however, the relationship between multiple role commitments and health at older ages remains unclear.

Many young carers are not using the services available to them. Independent researcher Berni Graham looks at one council's investigation of why this is the case.

Service user and carer involvement in social work education is now well established since its inception as a compulsory requirement in the social work curriculum in the United Kingdom in 2003. Since then, there have been many examples of how such involvement has been approached by education providers. Nevertheless, one of the key obstacles and challenges in this field continues to centre on the need to achieve non-tokenistic user involvement which cements the engagement of service users and carers at the heart of social work education.

This paper explores the relationship between the dimensions of a debate cited at the intersection of ageing, gender, and family care. It draws together evidence from the General Household Survey for Britain 2000 and social research to explore the contribution and conceptualization of caring by older husbands. UK research on caring reveals that among older spouses, equal numbers of husbands and wives provide intensive care.

Aim: To evaluate the effectiveness of the Learn Now; Live Well (LNLW) educational programme on enhancing the knowledge and support of caregivers living with a life-threatening illness.

Design: A combined summative and formative evaluation design was used. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected using a questionnaire with a five-point response scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree and semi-structured interviews.

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.

Summary: The evaluation of a project instigated by a voluntary group provided an opportunity to investigate the benefits of holiday breaks to both carers and participants. Feedback was obtained from over 100 people with intellectual disabilities through individual and group interviews, as well as from their carers using self-completed questionnaires.

BACKGROUND: The negative health impacts of prolonged caregiving are widely reported. However, there is a paucity of evidence concerning the impacts of a lifetime of caring on older parents of offspring with learning disabilities.

DESIGN AND METHODS: An exploratory postal survey including the Medical Outcome Study (Short Form) 36 version 2 (SF-36v2) was completed by 100 older parent carers. The reported survey is part of a larger mixed method study including in-depth interviews.

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.

Reports on a study which aimed to explore the roles and support needs of carers whose relative is placed in long-term care; identify the range and types of services available; and explore was to support carers more effectively. It draws on evidence from a pilot study conducted in 2002/03 in one area of South East England, and a supplemental literature review.