Planning

Little attention has been paid to the immense struggles facing disabled people and their caregivers as they try to plan their long-term futures. This book sets out practical ways to maximise future care options for such community care user groups. It focuses on the priorities of older caregivers and people with learning disabilities to give numerous suggestions for increasing control people have over their affairs and links these to central legislation and entitlement issues.

More than three-fourths of older adults with developmental disabilities and mental illness live in the community with aging parents, the majority of whom do not complete plans for the residential, financial, and legal future of their offspring. The authors used a true experimental design to evaluate the effectiveness of a six-week psychoeducational group intervention with 27 older mothers. Data collected in pre- and posttest telephone interviews were analyzed with repeated measures MANCOVA to test five hypotheses.

The LEAP (learning, evaluation and planning) framework is a toolkit designed to support a partnership approach to achieving change and improvement in the quality of community life. It has been used by policy makers, practitioners, and community activists in the fields of health education; adult learning; volunteering; and environmental planning. The framework will be of interest to anyone interested in using a partnership approach to improving outcomes for communities, service users and carers.

The majority of adults with a learning disability live with family carers, many of whom are ageing and have support needs of their own. Planning for the future thus becomes the key to preventing a crisis situation when family care is no longer viable because of death or ill health. Existing knowledge and practice are largely based upon the perspective of professionals and carers. This study explores the views, aspirations and concerns of adults with a learning disability, about living at home and planning for the future.

To help fulfil their responsibilities towards unpaid carers, service providers need some idea of the carer's situation and how many might require support. This paper argues that estimating the prevalence of unpaid care across service planning and budgeting cycles provides a better indication of the size and composition of the carer population than estimates at a point in time. The article presents prevalence rates of unpaid adult care from the British Household Panel Survey.