Family

Aim.  This paper presents findings from secondary analysis of longitudinal data on correlates of care relationship mutuality collected from 91 carers of people with Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease in the control group of a randomized trial of home-care skill training.

Yet further evidence has emerged of the huge number of young carers whose caring roles are not known to their school and who are therefore not receiving the support they need. Almost 500 young carers who were previously unknown to their schools were discovered during a project to offer young carers better recognition and support. The 35 schools taking part in the Young Carers in School programme reported a dramatic impact on the attendance, achievement and confidence of pupils who care for a loved one.

Caregiving is one of the most important personal sacrifices family members make for their older loved ones. There are at least 43.5 million caregivers in the United States who provide informal family caregiving, averaging about 19 hours of care per week, for an average of 4 years.1 Although family members, especially spouses and adult children, usually occupy these caregiving roles, in diverse cultural and ethnic groups with collectivistic values, caregivers also may be fictive kin (relatives not related by blood, such as godchildren, family friends, or neighbors).

Well, that’s another Carers Week over and done with for another year, the 21st of such weeks apparently. What do you mean you didn’t know that there was one? This is the one week of the year where ‘informal carers’ are allowed to be ‘out and proud’.

Aims.  This paper reports a study to investigate the relationships between informal and formal care, changing relationships over time, impact of integrated care, and theoretical and methodological lessons that can be drawn from research on this topic.

This article suggests that relational approaches and carer-centred practice in mental health and other services might alleviate some of the burden on the health – both physical and mental – experienced by informal carers. Unhelpful staff attitudes and poor communication are barriers to effective engagement between professionals and carers.

Ask the experts is a forum in which consultant nurses working with older people debate an issue in older people's care and offer advice. This month, Soline Jerram, consultant nurse: older people and intermediate care, from Windsor, Ascot and Maidenhead PCT, poses questions brought to her by intermediate care staff and informal carers.

Being a close relative brings with it a large number of consequences, with the life situation changing over time. The aim of this study was to illuminate the experiences of being a middle-aged close relative of a person who has suffered a stroke 6 months after being discharged from a medical rehabilitation clinic. Narrative interviews were conducted with nine middle-aged close relatives and analysed using a content analysis with a latent approach.