Jour

Caring for a dependent elderly family member and employment are competing demands for men, and especially women, who work in the United States. Women traditionally function in the caregiving role for parents in need. Yet unlike their mothers before them, modern day women caring for elderly parents have more roles, and thus more role demands upon them. Traditional familial roles as wives, homemakers, and mothers are more often coupled with roles as paid workers and as caregiving daughters to dependent parents.

Poster presentation

Specialist mental health services for older people have grown rapidly and successfully over the past two decades, aiming to offer services that are comprehensive, accessible, responsive, individualised, multidisciplinary, accountable, and systematic. As with all mental health problems, the burden falls on primary care (where minor morbidity often goes undetected) and specialist services tend to be reserved for those conditions and patients where diagnosis and management is problematic.

Recent thinking about policy on cancer services in the UK has highlighted the importance of recognising the needs of carers, but is unclear about the ways in which this might be done. Our recent study on the psychosocial needs of cancer patients and their main informal carers was unusual in its combined focus on patients and carers experiencing the ‘cancer journey’ together. One of our aims was to contribute to an understanding of what it means to be the main carer of someone with cancer.

This article describes how Thurrock Council Social Services Department and South Essex Mental Health and Community Care NHS Trust launched a joint initiative to develop an integrated service strategy and implementation plan for older people's mental health services in Thurrock. The main principles of the approach were: service user and carer involvement, the active participation of mental health professionals working directly with service users and carers, representatives from all key agencies involved in the planning process.

This paper investigates the prevalence of incapacity in performing daily activities and the associations between household composition and availability of family members and receipt of care among older adults with functioning problems in Spain, England and the United States of America (USA).

We sought to examine the mental and physical health and health-related quality of life of current and past carers compared to non-carers, using two instruments—the Short Form-12 (SF-12) and the EuroQol 5-dimension (EQ-5D). A total of 249 participants (34 current carers, 14 previous carers, 197 non-carers, 4 non-respondents) completed a baseline self-report survey at randomization into the larger study.

Background: In the Netherlands, various organisational models of dementia case management exist.

This article reports findings from the literature about available services and good practice in service provision for younger onset dementia, both from Australia and overseas. It looks at the different service needs for people with younger onset dementia, support for carers, and also lists appropriate services from Australia, UK and the US. The article acknowledges that there is still too little awareness of younger onset dementia but that there is an increasing interest from both policy makers and researchers.

This paper considers the transformation of state social work over the past two decades. During this period, it is argued that a steady yet radical process of privatization has ensued which has had a considerable impact upon the experiences of ‘service users’, informal carers and social work practitioners. Not only does the private sector now dominate key sectors of social care, but it has also transformed the culture of state social work practice and many of the accepted beliefs and ideals of the social work profession.