Rand, Stacey

Background: The ASCOT-Carer and Carer Experience Scale are instruments designed to capture aspects of quality of life 'beyond health' for family carers. The aim of this study was to compare and validate these two carer care-related measures, with a secondary aim to compare both instruments to the three-level EQ-5D (EQ-5D-3 L) measure of health-related quality of life.

Background. To incorporate the spillover effects experienced by carers providing informal care in health policy decisions, new carer-related preference-based measures have been developed for use in economic evaluation, which include the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit for Carers (ASCOT-Carer), Carer Experience Scale (CES), and Care-Related Quality of Life (CarerQoL). The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which these 3 instruments measure complementary or overlapping constructs. Methods.

Objectives: To compare the psychometric properties of the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit for carers (ASCOT-Carer), the Carer Experience Scale (CES), and the Care-related Quality of Life (CarerQol) to inform the choice of instrument in future studies. Methods: Data were derived from a 2018 online survey of informal carers in Australia.

Informal carers (i.e. people who provide unpaid care to family and/or friends) are crucial in supporting people with long-term conditions. Caring negatively impacts on carers’ health and experiences of health services. Internationally and nationally, policies, legislation, professional guidance and research advocate for health and care services to do more to support carers. This study explored the views of health and social care providers, commissioners and policy makers about the role and scope for strengthening health service support for carers.

Unpaid care is an important part of long-term care systems. It is increasingly recognised that carers have their own health and well-being needs. Carer-specific interventions, as well as support for the care-recipient, may enable carers to maintain their own health and well-being alongside caring. This study seeks to establish whether and how community-based care services affect carers' quality of life.

Improving the quality of life of carers is the ultimate goal of carers’ policy and support services. This article discusses the issues and challenges in conceptualising and comparing carers’ quality of life in England and Japan, based on developing a Japanese version of the self-completion Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit for Carers (ASCOT-Carer). Since supporting carers in employment is a key concern in both countries, we particularly focus on this group of carers.

Purpose: Unpaid care is an important source of support of people with long-term conditions. Interdependence of carers’ and care recipients’ quality of life would be expected due to the relational nature of caregiving. This study aims to explore interdependence of quality of life in carer/care-recipient dyads, especially in relation to mutual interdependence due to social feedback in the caregiving relationship and also the partner effects of one partner’s experience of long-term care support on the other’s outcomes.