English

The aim of this study was to illuminate the meaning of parental care-giving with reference to having an adult son or daughter with severe mental illness living in a care setting. The parents were asked to narrate their relationship to offspring in the past, in the present, and their thoughts and feelings concerning the future. The study was guided by a phenomenological hermeneutic perspective.

Increasing proportions of men and women are combining family (including care-giving) and work responsibilities in later life; however, the relationship between multiple role commitments and health at older ages remains unclear.

Many young carers are not using the services available to them. Independent researcher Berni Graham looks at one council's investigation of why this is the case.

This paper explores the relationship between the dimensions of a debate cited at the intersection of ageing, gender, and family care. It draws together evidence from the General Household Survey for Britain 2000 and social research to explore the contribution and conceptualization of caring by older husbands. UK research on caring reveals that among older spouses, equal numbers of husbands and wives provide intensive care.

Aim: To evaluate the effectiveness of the Learn Now; Live Well (LNLW) educational programme on enhancing the knowledge and support of caregivers living with a life-threatening illness.

Design: A combined summative and formative evaluation design was used. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected using a questionnaire with a five-point response scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree and semi-structured interviews.

The paper examines trends in the probability of providing intense care for older parents over the fifteen years between 1985 and 2000, and asks what would happen to the numbers of people providing care to older parents if these trends were to continue in the coming decades. Because the present study is based on an analysis of past trends in provision of informal care, it allows for some key assumptions underlying the projections of informal care in future years to be examined empirically.

This study investigates whether men and women in caring occupations experience more negative job-related feelings at the end of the day compared to the rest of the working population. The data are from Wave Nine of the British Household Panel Survey (1999) where respondents were asked whether, at the end of the working day, they tended to keep worrying or have trouble unwinding, and the extent to which work left them feeling exhausted or “used up.” Their responses to these questions were used to develop ordinal dependent variables.

The incorporation of informal care into economic evaluations of health care is troublesome. The debate focuses on the valuation of time spent on informal caregiving, while time measurement, a related and may be even a more important issue, tends to be neglected. Valid time measurement is a necessary condition for the valuation of informal care. In this paper, two methods of time measurement are compared and evaluated: the diary, which is considered the gold standard, and the recall method, which is applied more often.

This paper outlines two challenges to community nurses as they work with unpaid carers. These reflect a changing culture in the way that healthcare will be delivered in the coming decade. The first of these challenges is a shift towards focusing on outcomes for both service users and adult carers. Outcomes evidence the impact a service has on a person's life. The second is the increasing focus on the concept of carers as partners in care. 

Research has been undertaken to look at how well social care and health organisations involve adult carers in service planning and delivery. This article concludes that while some carers are involved at a strategic level, carers are most dissatisfied about their involvement in individual assessment processes and outcomes. [Abstract]