Family

Background: In recent years, there has been a gradual shift towards the study of individual symptom presentations in psychosis, this is particularly found in studies of delusional beliefs. However, the literature remains sparse on informal caregiver experiences of individual symptoms.

Aim: The study sought to investigate carer experiences of supporting a relative with delusional beliefs, which involve family members.

Methods: Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with five caregivers and subject to interpretative phenomenological analysis.

The purpose of our research was to investigate male caregiving via a status of being hidden and forgotten in East-Central Europe, where caregiving itself had only lately been emancipated, and only as provided by women. In Poland and in other European countries the gender bias is clear: men provide less care than women, the care is less intensive and of a different character. By desk research, own research interpretation and literature review, the paper addressed informal, family caregiving towards frail older adults performed by men.

Aim: To elicit the strategies used by Japanese family caregivers in the community to encourage older relatives with dementia to use adult daycare and respite stays.

Background: Older adults with dementia often require adult daycare and respite stays for their family caregivers to gain respite from care-giving. However, persons with dementia often face difficulty in new environments and timely access to sufficient services may be difficult to achieve. Few studies have examined how family caregivers encourage their service use.

Design: A qualitative method.

In this article, we explore the interaction between female and male employment, parenting responsibilities and family policy in Russia and Sweden. The study is based first on indicators of public social services, assistance for families and labour force data; and second, on the ISSP modules on Family and Changing Gender Roles (years 1994, 2002). The results show that both Sweden and Russia facilitate the 'dual-earner' family model, but that Sweden places a greater emphasis on dual-caring and flexible work arrangements for women.

Bringing into operation a group of support and mutual help for informal carers of dependent elderly people at 'Vargas' Health Centre is a necessity that cant be postponed any longer.The project which we want to carry out takes into account the welfare of both the carer and the elderly and consist of supporting the carers by listening to them, by raising their awareness about the importance of the work they do, both for the relative they look after and for society as a whole, and by teaching them to look after themselves during the caring period.

In the UK, the number of people with dementia is increasing along with life expectancy - over half of the £23bn annual cost of dementia is due to informal care time. Therefore, there is an economic argument for identifying clinically-effective and cost-effective ways to maintain and improve carer quality of life (QoL). This thesis explores the suitability of a capability based instrument, the ICECAP-O, for measuring QoL in informal carers of people with dementia. Methods: Systematic reviews, qualitative interviews, survey data and clinical trial data were used.

The stress of care giving for spouses and adult children has been extensively documented in the empirical literature. More recently attention has been paid to children's involvement in family care giving. Qualitative studies in the social welfare field have highlighted the social restrictions caring places upon children. There remains a need, however, to understand what children are thinking and feeling in an effort to cope with their care-giving demands.

Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the UK. Despite this, little is known about the care needs of people who die from or following a stroke. In early 2003, a total of 183 questionnaires were returned from a survey of 493 people who had registered a stroke-related death in four Primary Care Trusts, giving a response rate of 37%. This paper reports on 53 deceased from the survey who had lived at home during their last 3 months and who had been ill for more than 1 month.

This paper assesses some of the implications of one of the major social changes to have taken place in the West during the second half of the twentieth century — that is, the increased employment of women, together with normative changes in gender relations and in women's expectations. These changes have been linked to an increase in individualism, which itself is associated with the transcendence of ‘first modernity’. Thus it is suggested that new approaches to social analysis are required (Beck).

Family caregivers are indispensable, yet they often feel underappreciated and inadequately supported by nurses and social workers. When they visit a hospitalized loved one, they may never be asked, "How are you doing? How are you managing?" They need more help on two fronts: becoming better caregivers and avoiding becoming patients themselves.