English

A significant number of children and young people are caring for a parent or parents with mental health problems defined as serious or severe, and enduring. Children and young people with these responsibilities are often referred to as young carers. It is important that they are recognised as children and young people in the first instance, then as carers. And what helps these young people most is the support that is provided to their parents. 

Health professionals such as nurses, physiotherapists and occupational therapists provide a wealth of support in the community to patients and their carers receiving palliative care. Moving and handling is one such support that needs careful consideration and assessment including risk, by appropriately qualified professionals. A combination of skills are required as well as knowledge of up to date equipment to assist the health professional in deciding how to formulate safe moving and handling interventions in a timely way.

Objective: To describe the number and types of problems mentioned by successfully contacted home-dwelling stroke patients and their carers, and nursing interventions applied.

Design: In this multicentre quantitative study in the Netherlands, stroke patients and carers received outreach nurse support consisting of three telephone contacts and one home visit within six months after discharge. Standardized checklists describing a wide range of potential problems were used to record problems and interventions.

The author highlights the plight of young carers whose support needs are often overlooked and whose hard work is seldom recognised. Cites four references.

For the past decade nurse education has incorporated service user and carer perspectives into their programme and research agendas. Moving from rhetoric to the reality of embedding adult service user and carer knowledge into nurse education this paper discusses how this good practice was extended to young people under the age of 18. Globally, the mental health of young people is coming under the spotlight and based on this two “World Café” events focusing on young people and their mental well being were organised.

Changes in the living circumstances of people with learning disabilities have seen responsibility for their health become the provenance of paid-and family-carers. Thirteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with three family-carers and ten paid-carers. Findings revealed that the role of these carers was undefined, leading to difficulty in deciphering who was responsible for the health care of the people they supported, with some paid-carers claiming that health was outwith their remit.

This study describes informal caregivers' unmet needs for community services and investigates the association between unmet needs and caregiving strain. The data used in this study were extracted from the Family Caregiving in the U.S. Survey and included 463 caregivers caring for an older adult who received community services. Among these caregivers, over one-third reported that the community services used by the care receivers did not meet their needs.

Family caregivers are crucial for supporting home death. We reviewed published qualitative research on home-based family caregiving at end of life (1998—2008), synthesizing key findings and identifying gaps where additional research is needed. Multiple databases were searched and abstracts reviewed for a focus on family caregiving and palliative care; full articles were reviewed to extract data for this review. In total, 105 articles were included.

Caring in Later Life is a review of the needs and roles of older carers (Milne et al, 2001). It brings together a wide‐ranging review of academic and policy literature with an original meta‐analysis of the 1995 General Household Survey (OPCS, 1995). This paper focuses on the findings of the GHS analysis. The picture of older carers that emerges is significantly different from that of carers overall.It is clear that older carers constitute a large and growing number of the carers and represent an increasingly large proportion of the total number of UK carers.