Comparisons

Background Burden on the relatives of patients with schizophrenia may be influenced not only by patient and caregiver characteristics, but also by differences in mental health service provision.

Aims To analyse whether family burden is affected by national differences in the provision of mental health services.

Objective: Demonstration studies of community treatment as an alternative to hospitalization have reported high degrees of satisfaction by family carers. We aimed to determine the extent of carer preference for hospital versus community treatment for acute mental illness in a routine setting where carers had experienced both service types.

This article examines three policy statements on informal carers published in the UK in 1999—the National Strategy for Carers, the report of the Royal Commission on Long Term Care and the note of dissent by two members of the Royal Commission. These three documents contain two rather different approaches to policy for carers. On the one hand, the National Strategy and note of dissent emphasize respite care or short-term breaks for carers, and are concerned with sustaining the well-being of carers as well as ensuring the continuation of caring itself.

Future increases in need of old-age care warrant research on receipt of informal care among older people in different policy and cultural contexts. Separating informal care into help provided by spouse and by children may shed more light on dynamics of informal help, important in alleviating the demands on the formal sector. Using nationally representative data from England and Finland, we performed logistic regression analyses to study receipt of help from spouse and children among community-dwelling persons aged 70+ years with functional limitations.