English

Although Jean Tottie had worked in health and social care for 35 years, mostly in older people's services, nothing prepared her for her caring role. She found it a huge struggle trying to get the right care at the right time for her father so that he could stay living independently at home; so much so that she did not recognise her own needs. Here is Jean's story. 

Mental health services are required to involve family, carers, and service users in the delivery and development of mental health services but how this can be done in routine practice is challenging. One potential solution is to prescribe practice standards or clear expectation relating to family involvement. This paper describes practice standards introduced to an adult mental health service and a study that aimed to evaluate the impact of the standards on practice.

This chapter explores the provision of care and considers possible future developments and the challenges around provision. We begin with a discussion of human resources, posing the question of whether the UK can satisfy the growing demand for carers, both informal and professional. We specifically examine the different types of carer: the self-carer, informal carers and professionals – social carers, nurses, and doctors, and the implications for health and social care policy and consider the implications for these carer roles in society.

With a landmark study under way on domestic violence among older people, the author investigates abuse that has long been overlooked. 

This report presents a series of recommendations for Government and Strategic Health Authorities, Primary Care Trusts, GPs and Primary Health Care Teams, with the aim of improving the way primary care services identify and support carers. The recommendations are based on conclusions which emerged from a nine-month primary care project for The Princess Royal Trust for Carers. The project aimed to find the most effective ways within primary care to identify carers and encourage them to use the services available.

Support for family caregivers is a core function of palliative care. However, there is a lack of consistency in the way needs are assessed, few longitudinal studies to examine the impact of caregiving, and a dearth of evidence-based interventions. In order to help redress this situation, identification of suitable instruments to examine the caregiving experience and the effectiveness of interventions is required.

Objective: Family caregivers often accompany patients to medical visits; however, it is unclear whether caregivers rate the quality of patients' care similarly to patients. This study aimed to (1) quantify the level of agreement between patients' and caregivers' reports on the quality of patients' care and (2) determine how the level of agreement varies by caregiver and patient characteristics.

Design: Cross-sectional analysis. Participants: Multimorbid older (aged 65 and above) adults and their family caregivers (n = 247).

This article reports the findings of a literature review of research that has explored the support experiences of family carers of a person with an intellectual disability who displays challenging behaviour and/or has a mental health problem. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of the reported experiences of family carers from recent research studies, about their own support. Having discussed the search strategy, definitions of challenging behaviour and mental health/illness are presented.

The Health & Social Care (H&SC) Task Force, the membership of which is set out in annex B, was one of four such task forces established to develop proposals for measures to be included in the new Carers’ Strategy1 . This report comprises proposals developed by the group which were put to the Interdepartmental Group chaired by David Behan, Director-General Social Care, Local Government and Care Partnerships, Department of Health, which oversaw the development of the strategy as a whole.