carers

Scottish Highlands: Elizabeth Jones reports on a three-year project providing support to carers of people with dementia in remote, scattered communities in the Highlands of Scotland.

The Minority Ethnic Carers of Older People Project - Mecopp - provides respite care and advocacy for carers in Scotland. This article looks at how the project has expanded and why the model works.

Capital is a user‐led training, consultancy and research organisation based in West Sussex. When the local mental health trust decided to evaluate its assertive outreach team, Capital bid to conduct a qualitative review through one‐to‐one interviews with the team's clients and their carers. In this candid article the project team members describe the process, the hurdles and obstacles they encountered, how they were negotiated or overcome, and what they learned from the experience.

Outreach is advocated as a way of improving the uptake of services among underserved populations and of filling the gaps between mainstream services and the populations they are intended to support. Despite the policy emphasis on providing better help for family carers, research consistently shows that many of those providing unpaid care to a family member or friend report difficulties in finding out about the assistance to which they are entitled.

Up to one and a half million people in Britain are involved in caring for a relative or friend with mental illness or dementia. Recent government policy has emphasised the needs of this particular group of carers, but effective support can be implemented only if managers and practitioners know what works.

Looks at the findings from a review of mental health carer support and the effectiveness of the services on offer. The review was carried out by the Social Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of York.

The phenomenon of post-traumatic growth has been explored within the context of HIV disease in only a limited fashion. One hundred and seventy-six bereaved HIV/AIDS carers located all over Canada responded to a questionnaire about their experiences; 51.7% of these individuals were male, 46% were female and 2.3% were transgender. The range of deaths experienced was from 0 to 110. Forty-four per cent of the carers were themselves HIV-positive. Of all the HIV carers in this study, 86.4% of them exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Objective To evaluate the effectiveness of a voluntary sector based befriending scheme in improving psychological wellbeing and quality of life for family carers of people with dementia. Design Single blind randomised controlled trial. Setting Community settings in East Anglia and London. Participants 236 family carers of people with primary progressive dementia. Intervention Contact with a befriender facilitator and offer of match with a trained lay volunteer befriender compared with no befriender facilita

Family carers of people with a severe mental illness play a vital, yet often unrecognized and undervalued role in Australian society. Respite care services can assist these family carers in their role; however, little is known about their access to these services. The paper addresses this knowledge gap. An exploratory field study was conducted throughout the eastern suburbs of Sydney, Australia, to identify and examine the factors influencing the use and provision of respite services for older carers of people with a mental illness.

BACKGROUND: Families/carers relinquishing the care of family members with a disability into the care of out-of-home respite facilities is an under-researched area in the disability field.

Increasingly greater numbers of older parents are providing care at home for their sons and daughters with intellectual disabilities. As attention needs to be paid to the supports needed by such families to assist them with their caregiving activities, it is prudent to identify the types of supports that will be needed when the parents are no longer able to provide care. Working with a cohort of older parent carers in Prince Edward Island, Canada, the authors undertook to examine older carer concerns and planning issues.