Informal care

People with learning disabilities have high dependency needs and high prevalence of physical, psychological and social morbidities. Some studies have shown that South Asian and white populations have a similar prevalence of learning disabilities and related psychological morbidity (McGrother et al, 2002), although other studies have shown an increased prevalence of severe levels of learning disabilities in the South Asian population (Emerson et al, 1997).

Objectives: To understand how carers of dementia sufferers gain access to community support and to determine potential barriers for carers.

Design: Qualitative study using semi-structured interviews of carers after an Aged Care Assessment Team intervention.

Setting: Australian metropolitan Aged Care Assessment Team.

Subjects: 24 live-in carers of dementia sufferers.

Economic evaluations of health interventions aim to support decision making in healthcare. To effectively do so, evaluations need to include all relevant costs and effects of an intervention. Informal care provided by family or friends is an important element of care for many patients, but can have a profound impact on the health and well-being of carers. Therefore, informal care should be considered in economic evaluations of health interventions. Different methods to do so exist.

Informal caring for adults with disabilities is a source of unacceptable disadvantage in employment, finances, social inclusion, and health; here termed the ‘care penalty’. This penalty can be appropriately tackled through equality law, making care a ground for unlawful discrimination. Carers are not adequately protected from indirectly discriminatory disadvantages by other grounds such as sex and disability. Nor are carers adequately protected by carer-specific provisions such as the UK right to request flexible working.

Unpaid carers of adults, as a group, have, until recently, been largely neglected by the EU. While a number of provisions of EU law – including anti-discrimination measures and protections for part time workers – may benefit (some) carers of adults in the workplace, the existing package of work–life balance regulation falls well short of a coherent approach to addressing the needs of this group.

This paper analyzes the impact of informal care by adult children on the use of long-term care among the elderly in Europe and the effect of the level of the parent’s disability on this relationship. We focus on two types of formal home care that are the most likely to interact with informal care: paid domestic help and nursing care.

As people continue to age and receive complex health care services at home, concern has arisen about the availability of family caregivers and their ability to combine employment with caregiving.

Data from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health were used to study the order of events leading to informal caregiving and changes in labour force participation in mid-aged women, taking into account health and socioeconomic status. This analysis included 9857 women who responded to the third (2001) and fourth (2004) surveys and provided data for the caring and employment variables used. Caring was defined as providing care for an ill, frail or disabled person at least 7 h/wk. Between 2001 and 2004, the proportion of women caring increased from 12 to 14%.