What is it about?
Caring for a family member or friend can be a rewarding thing to do. But caring for long hours and with little support can take a toll on carer health. Sometimes carers who are in intensive caring roles need support to think about their own quality of life and wellbeing. We think that using images of different types of short breaks and experiences might help carers to think about different possibilities from how daily life life is for them now. We worked unpaid carers and staff who support them to look at some images that might encourage different conversations and open up new possibilities for carers and this paper reports our findings of this early stage research.
Featured Image
Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash
Why is it important?
With reductions in formal services, unpaid carers are often facing very intensive caring situations which can have negative impacts on their health. Carers need breaks but may struggle to think about taking time out from their caring role. We need to find ways to open up different conversations and we have found that images can help.
Perspectives
I don't think that unpaid caring is valued as it should be. I want more people to understand how important caring is to our society and to make sure that carers are able to take breaks, feel valued and be as well as they can be.
Emma Miller
University of Strathclyde
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Exploring the use of images to support short break conversations with unpaid carers, Quality of Ageing, June 2023, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/qaoa-01-2023-0001.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
