Home care

In this video we meet Jim and Janet Swift, both keen travellers until Janet was diagnosed with dementia at the age of 58. Jim's account of their experience illustrates the widespread effect of a very rapid deterioration, and explores the sense of loss and loneliness that can be part of the caring role. His account also highlights the need for skilled, experienced support for carers – in this case provided by an Admiral Nurse - together with access to regular breaks from the caring role.

In the present meta-analysis, we integrated findings from 228 studies on the association of six caregiving-related stressors and caregiving uplifts with burden and depressed mood. Care recipients' behavior problems showed stronger associations with caregiver outcomes than other stressors did. The size of the relationships varied by sample characteristics: Amount of care provided and care receivers' physical impairments were less strongly related to burden and depression for dementia caregivers than for caregivers of nondemented older adults.

In the first of our Future Care series, Care and technology in the 21st centuryexplores the current landscape on care and technology and calls for a technological transformation in the way we support families caring for ill, frail and disabled loved ones.

The report argues that the way families already use technology to work, plan their lives, shop and socialize should also be reflected in how we care and calls on the Government to set up a new independent, expert taskforce to drive innovation and partnership on care technology.

This chapter examines the impact of caring on the lives of young people (i.e. those under 18). The authors point to the difficulties in enumerating such carers. They estimate numbers in excess of 50,000. Although the issue of young caring is not new, research into the phenomenon is. The authors refer to the initial studies of the late 1980s and early 1990s. They focus on the work of the Young Carers Research Group (YCRG), established in 1992. The Group has an on-going work programme which aims to give young carers a voice, raise awareness and influence policy.

The film provides an introduction to home care reablement. Reablement is a relatively new service aimed at supporting people to regain independence that may have been reduced or lost through illness or disability. The film focuses on the reablement service in the London Borough of Sutton, known as START (Short Term Assessment and Reablement Team), where we follow the experiences of two people using the service and hear from the manager and senior carer. We also hear from health economist Prof Julien Forder about new research evidence on the cost effectiveness of reablement.

The overall goal of the study reported in this paper was to examine differences in the perceived occurrence of abuse and neglect as between older care recipients, their family carers, and foreign home-care workers in Israel. Overall, 148 matched family members and foreign home-care workers and 75 care recipients completed a survey of abuse and neglect. Significant discrepancies in their reports of neglect were found, with the foreign home-care workers more likely to identify neglect (66%) than the older adults (27.7%) or their family members (29.5%).

This film focuses on Tim Anfilogoff, the Commissioner for Adult Services at Hertfordshire County Council. Hertfordshire has achieved Beacon status for its work with carers, and this film demonstrates how the council is working with carers, and listening to their experiences and feedback to ensure both the carers and the service users receive the best possible service. It features carer Mari Stevenson who talks about her personal experiences of caring for her daughter who is diabetic and has Down’s Syndrome.

A caregiver is an unpaid person, typically a family member or friend, who helps an ill person with the physical care and management of a disease. The task of care-giving results in additional responsibilities on the caregiver's daily life, and occupies the caregiver's time, energy, and attention, which is demanding and complex. The burden from care-giving, when prolonged, might affect the physical health of caregivers, causing symptoms, such as anxiety and depression, leading to a negative impact on their capacity for social engagement.

Chronic Illness represents a growing concern in the western world and individuals living with chronic illness are primarily managed at home by family caregivers. A scoping review of the home-care literature (2004-2009; updated with review articles from 2010 to January 2013) on the topic of the caregiver revealed that this group experiences the following safety-related concerns: caregivers are conscripted to the role, experience economic hardship, risk being abused as well as abusing, and may well become patients themselves.