Uk

Policy on care in the community was founded on the premise that the care of frail elderly people with disabilities would be a joint responsibility for health and social care professionals, and family carers, supported by people within their social networks. The policy assumes that such social networks are common features of all communities in contemporary Britain, containing a reserve of people who can be called upon to provide support to carers.

Objective: To develop an intervention, using the first three phases of the Medical Research Council (MRC) framework for complex interventions, to facilitate coping skills in new carers of stroke patients.

Aim.  This paper reports a study to assess the palliative care needs of the adult population served by a healthcare provider organization in Northern Ireland from the perspectives of patients, informal carers and healthcare providers.

Aims and objectives.  To determine the feasibility of a screening tool to identify carers in a general practice.

This paper identifies variations in the age and gender characteristics of informal carers in the UK. The paper is based on the Individual Sample of Anonymous Records, a 3% random sample of the 2001 UK Census. The sample size was 1 825 595. Of this sample, 10% were reported to be carers. The analysis shows that informal caregiving is systematically linked with both age and gender. Caregiving increased with age until reaching a peak in the 45-59 age group, in which almost 20% were carers.

Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the UK. Despite this, little is known about the care needs of people who die from or following a stroke. In early 2003, a total of 183 questionnaires were returned from a survey of 493 people who had registered a stroke-related death in four Primary Care Trusts, giving a response rate of 37%. This paper reports on 53 deceased from the survey who had lived at home during their last 3 months and who had been ill for more than 1 month.

Objective: To estimate the value of informal care in Alzheimer's disease using contingent valuation.

Methods: A questionnaire was administered to 517 primary carers in four countries (UK, Spain, Sweden, and US). Dichotomous choice and bidding game methods were used to elicit their willingness to pay for a reduction in care burden by 1 h per day, or a total elimination of care needs. Further, the relationship between carer willingness to pay and carer and patient characteristics including disease severity and income was examined.

Little has been written on informal care of an older relative among minority ethnic groups in the UK. This paper examines the meanings of being an informal carer of an older family member for South Asian and African/Caribbean carers. The analysis presented here is based on qualitative interviews with 21 African/Caribbean and 15 South Asian carers. Drawing primarily on the notions of biographical continuity, biographical reinforcement and biographical disruption, the meanings of caring are examined.

The UK Government has highlighted the need to develop appropriate information and support services for informal carers. Previous research that has investigated informal caring has found that managing medication is one aspect of the caring role that presents its own problems; however, these have not been subject to detailed examination. The objective of the present paper was to report the number and type of problems experienced by informal carers when managing medication for older care recipients, and to relate these to measures of coping and health.

The continuing expansion of women's employment has increasingly focused attention on the question of how the caring work traditionally carried out by unpaid women will be accomplished. In particular, how can caring responsibilities be combined with a long-term career? In this paper, we assess the significance of the national context through a comparison of the biographies of career bank managers, male and female, in Britain and Norway.