social care

AIM: To explore the role of prisoner caregivers in providing peer social care to older prisoners and to identify methodological information and challenges to conducting research in prisons, to inform future research in this setting. METHOD: The literature review was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, a systematic literature review was undertaken to retrieve articles related to prisoner caregiving. The main themes from these articles were identified.

Family members are delivering unpaid care to loved-ones because direct payments are insufficient to hire staff, writes Belinda Schwehr. 

Umbrella body Shared Lives Plus calls for national awareness raising campaign to help boost carer numbers. 

Summary: This paper focuses on the impact of a personal budget – either in the form of a direct payment or managed personal budget – on the role of unpaid carers of older budget holders. Data were collected via postal survey of 1500 unpaid carers and semi-structured interviews with 31 carers. Findings: Unpaid carers played a central role in supporting older budget holders irrespective of the type of budget received.

This research contributes a first-hand account of the experiences of youth’s substantial unpaid familial caregiving in the context of long-term illness, disability or problems related to alcohol and/or other drugs. A qualitative focus group methodology explored the benefits and challenges of youth’s caregiving via a sample of 15 youth caregivers (or young carers) from both the Greater Toronto area and the Niagara Region of Southern Ontario.

Informal care plays a significant role in the care system for older people in the United Kingdom, and this is projected to increase considerably in the next three decades as the population ages. Understanding these trends requires a good quality measurement of informal care. In this study, the authors compare care-givers’ responses to different informal care questions from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) to investigate the influence of question design on the self-reporting of informal care.

Reconciliation of unpaid care and employment is an increasingly important societal, economic and policy issue, both in the UK and internationally. Previous research shows the effectiveness of formal social care services in enabling carers to remain in employment. Using quantitative and qualitative data collected from carers and the person they care for in 2013 and 2015, during a period of cuts to adult social care in England, we explore barriers experienced to receipt of social care services.

With the continued implementation of the personalisation policy, Personal Budgets (PBs) have moved to the mainstream in adult social care in England. The relationship between the policy goals of personalisation and safeguarding is contentious. Some have argued that PBs have the potential to empower recipients, while others believe PBs, especially Direct Payments, might increase the risk of abuse.

Few accounts exist of programmes in low- and middle-income countries seeking to strengthen community knowledge and skills in mental health. This case study uses a realist lens to explore how a mental health project in a context with few mental health services, strengthened community mental health competence by increasing community knowledge, creating safer social spaces and engaging partnerships for action.

Objective: The aim of this study was to estimate the cost of dementia in the Czech Republic.; Methods: One hundred and nineteen patient-caregiver dyads participated in our multicenter observational cost-of-illness study. The modified Resource Utilization in Dementia Questionnaire was used as the main tool to collect data from patients and caregivers. Medical specialists provided additional data from medical records. The average costs of dementia were calculated and patients were then divided by the level of cognitive impairment.