carers

Aims and objectives.  This study explores the role of the carer in treatment decision-making in cancer care.

Approximately 1,000,000men currently care for spouses with cognitive impairment after leaving market-economy careers through normative or early retirement. In the process, they made the difficult transition from work in the public arena to the private, largely invisible world of family care. This article explores how elderly men caregivers adapt to such drastic changes in social location, what resources they call upon to ameliorate the impact of those changes, and what we can learn from their experiences that will inform future research and practice.

Caring for a loved one can take its toll physically and emotionally. Caroline Swinburne discovers how district nurses can ease the load. Supporting unpaid carers is an important but often unseen aspect of community nursing.

Besides patients’ health and well-being, healthcare interventions may affect the well-being of significant others. Such ‘spill over effects’ in significant others may be distinguished in two distinct effects: (i) the caregiving effect and (ii) the family effect. The first refers to the welfare effects of providing informal care, i.e., the effects of caring for someone who is ill. The second refers to a direct influence of the health of a patient on others’ well-being, i.e., the effects of caring about other people.

This paper presents the findings from an evaluation of a creative musical project led by Scottish Opera. The project included people with dementia and their carers in the development, writing, design and performance of a musical production about their experiences of love. The project involved professional singers, artists and choreographers from the opera company. Activities involved practice sessions and performances.

Personalisation is now the driving agenda for adult social care and Putting People First recognises that increasing numbers of ordinary people will be called upon to contribute to care delivered in people’s own homes. Of the UK's six million carers, 1.3 million are already caring, unpaid, for over 50 hours a week. Carers have always wanted better outcomes for the people they care for. However, with many carers suffering poverty, ill health and isolation due to unsustainably heavy caring roles, they also want and deserve better outcomes for themselves.

Once again the issue of using electronic tagging to safeguard older people who wander has attracted media attention. It is tempting to see the arguments as simply two sided—one side stressing the need to ensure safety and the other waving the banners of civil liberties and human rights. We think that this is not simply a factual matter but one that touches important values to do with respect for people. The correct position, therefore, is to face the complex dilemma.

Being a caregiver with responsibility for someone with reduced health compared with not being a caregiver may mean different views of life satisfaction. Knowledge of what leads to reduced life satisfaction in caregivers may be helpful in interventions. Informal caregivers gainfully employed or not, aged 50–89 years, were studied with regard to life satisfaction depending on the extent of caregiving to identify types of social support of value for caregivers.

Reactions to caregiving and depression affect a carer's ability to continue in their caring role. This paper examines the relationship between reactions to caregiving and depression in carers of frail, older people and is a cross-sectional study of carers of community-living people (≥70 years), identified as frail, who completed a postal questionnaire. Reactions to caregiving were evaluated using the Caregiver Reaction Assessment. Anxiety and depression symptoms were measured using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale.