carers

This study focused on the experiences of informal caregivers of older adults and explored whether employment, use of home-care services, or other factors influence the health of caregivers and their ability to manage their caregiving and other responsibilities. Focus groups conducted with 26 caregivers and personal interviews with 4 caregivers identified 12 themes under 5 conceptual areas: caregiver health, relationships, independence, employment, and use of home-care services. The findings reveal that caregiving coupled with other responsibilities can have serious health effects.

The ‘sandwich generation’ has been conceptualised as those mid-life adults who simultaneously raise dependent children and care for frail elderly parents. Such a combination of dependants is in fact very unusual, and the more common situation is when adults in late mid-life or early old age have one or more surviving parents and adult but still partly dependent children.

Objective To identify common difficult decisions made by family carers on behalf of people with dementia, and facilitators of and barriers to such decisions, in order to produce information for family carers about overcoming barriers.

Design Qualitative study to delineate decision areas through focus groups and complexity of decision making in individual interviews.

Setting Community settings in London.

Carers UK is calling for a social contract for care following research it launched last month. Evidence from reports – the Carers, Employment and Services series – shows the need for a radical shake-up to the way we support carers.

Carers have greater risk of ill health and unemployment according to the latest comprehensive research for Carers UK. Sue Yeandle outlines what reforms are needed. 

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.

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.

Health care for individuals with disability is increasingly shifting from institutional settings to the "community," with assistance by those in the formal sector. In this article, the authors examine 5 case studies illustrating interactions and relationships between people with disability and their caregivers, using qualitative data collected as part of a community study of disability conducted in a medium-sized city in the northeastern United States.

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.

This paper describes the increased national focus on including families and carers in all aspects of mainstream mental health services. It proposes that the specific recommendations included in the National Service Framework for Mental Health be brought together in the form of a strategy to enhance working partnerships with families and carers. It advocates that the implementation of the NSF requires a comprehensive awareness and basic skills training in order that the consideration of families and carers becomes a routine part of mainstream services. 

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).