Category Archives: Caring Hints & Tips

My ideas to help carers to help in their caring role

Learning for living – A way for carers to gain skills.

matDid you know that there are around 7 million carers in the UK? Give or take many more hidden carers? Did you also know that around 1 in 5 carers leave their job to care and many more carers provide care for so long it is harder to get back into employment. Carers across the UK save over £150 billion for the economy and even if it was not about the costs, then it is certainly about valuing what carers do.

Often when I hear from unpaid carers, they tell me how difficult it is to develop skills for the future. Just the look off a carer’s face shows me and that their confidence is gone.

By the Way, I have done a Vlog on this.  You can view the video below.

It is not like they want to just leave the person they are caring for in order to work again, but there is a nagging feeling that carers are being forgotten in education and being unable to attempt a future for themselves.

Giving help

It is understandable that many carers worry about what will happen when they become a former carers. They worry that they have given so much time and dedication to that special person, that they have neglected developing skills for themselves.

I would like to mention it is not like no one is trying to help, there are often activities, advice and skill sessions from carer centers. I would like to praise those giving much of their time and energy to help carers find those skills and confidence to access work, but the pressure is still there.

Carers want to find skills for work that relates to their values. Carers want to be welcomed into a job market that understands the attributes of dedication, serving others, being there and a willingness to continue learning.

It just so happens that Carers UK (A leading national charity giving carers a voice) have been looking into how carers can develop confidence and skills that ca help with employment.

Carers UK understands the stigma faced by many carers who feel they are locked out of education and looked down upon because they are not doing what every other person is doing….that 9 to 5 job.

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The situation is that carers work all sorts of hours and carers would love a chance to develop more skills, but unpaid carers need the tools to help them access such skills.

A couple of days ago I tested an online application that teaches carers about developing learning skills, which can give more confidence to many carers seeking a way to make a future for themselves.

The online application is simple and easy to use. It does not take a moment to register and then you are on your way. The online application is called ‘Learning for Living‘ and I really hope carers understand the importance that there is life after caring, or even during caring.

If there is anything I can take from the application is its flexibility as you can come back to the application any time and it does not have to be done in one sitting. The application is well thought out and delves deep into the virtues of caring and relates  caring into developing skills.

You should be able to access the ‘Learning for living’ application below.

https://www.learning4living.org/

Some carers do not even think they have skills due to their caring role, but all that needs to happen are tools that explain to carers that they already can developed skills and it just needs to be awakened.

There is no escape, carers have to engage with technology and the UK seeks to develop its technology infrastructure more.  Us carers cannot be left behind and using such applications is certainly the future.

As a working carer, I was invited to Carers UK HQ and submit my views of the application The discussion raised several interesting aspects among carers and representatives and it was excellent to see Minister for Care Caroline Dinenage attend, debate and listen to carers views.   I admired her compassion and determination to support the developments for unpaid carers.  

We all agreed carers have something to offer and even more to gain, even though carers have been giving so much all their lives.

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‘Learning for living’ gives carers that chance, we cannot sit back and hope opportunity comes our way, us carers need to take the chance and develop the confidence, understand our value and challenge the future.

Us carers have given so much to society, something that should be valued and treasured, it is about time we get to live for ourselves, its not selfish is it?

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Thank you for Carers who attended and Carers UK working hard to not only get carers that voice, but also the skills and a future.

Good luck on your caring journey.

Recommended Carer books

10 Helpful Hints for Carers: Practical Solutions for Carers Living with People with Dementia – June Andrews, Allan House

A Carer's Chaos - Julie Nancy Wiltshire

10 Helpful Hints for Carers is an easy-to-read guide for carers living with people with dementia. It provides simple, practical solutions to the everyday problems family carers can face when looking after a person with dementia.

A Carer’s Chaos – Julie Nancy Wiltshire

10 Helpful Hints for Carers Practical Solutions for Carers Living with People with Dementia

When Julie Wiltshire’s husband, David, was diagnosed with cancer twice, he faced a series of treatments made all the more difficult by multiple complications. In A Carer’s Chaos, Julie records the details of David’s long journey of cancer treatment, but also offers a unique perspective into life as a carer to a loved one, exploring the love, hate, anger, loneliness and fear experienced on a daily basis by a carer.

A Carer’s Odyssey – Anna Chan

A Carer's Odyssey - Anna Chan

In the first part of A Carer’s Odyssey, Anna Chan describes how she and her husband Jeff were devastated 16 years ago by the diagnosis of their daughter Emma’s severe neurological disorder, called Rett Syndrome.

A Gift for Carers – William Long

A Gift for Carers - William Long

This book was written following the author’s personal struggle with the psychological and physical pressures of caring for his mum. His experiences and research led him to develop a solution which counters the devastating effects of what the medical world refers to as “Caregiver Syndrome.” He identifies seven areas that make for a joyful life.

A Gradual Disappearance – Elizabeth Lonseth

A Gradual Disappearance - Elizabeth Lonseth

“Dementia is like a maze. Its victims get lost in the labyrinth of their own minds, bringing confusion and despair to themselves and to others around them. Families watch helplessly as their loved ones drift further and further away from reality, and when decisions are made, emotions often get in the way of what is really necessary.” – Dr. Sameh Elsanadi, MD Geriatric Psychiatrist

An Introduction to Coping with Depression for Carers – Tony Frais

An Introduction to Coping with Depression for Carers

Looking after a person with depression can often leave carers emotionally and physically exhausted. This short, straightforward and easily understandable guide offers valuable advice on how carers can

BMA Carer’s Manual – British Medical Association

BMA Carer's Manual

Endorsed by the British Medical Association, this is the definitive guide to caring for the elderly or sick, offering practical advice and solutions for everyday concerns such as adapting living space and safe movement and handling. Step-by-step sequences explain essential activities such as helping someone in and out of a chair and special features focus on topics relating to common conditions.

Carer’s Bible – Amanda Waring

Carer's Bible

This accessible and detailed guide includes practical tips, checklists for best practice, descriptions of their experience from a wide range of carers that addresses solutions to common problems, and expert advice on how to deliver compassionate and dignified care to older people.

Caring for a Loved One with an Eating Disorder – Jenny Langley, Janet Treasure, Gill Todd

Caring for a Loved One with an Eating Disorder

Caring for a Loved One with an Eating Disorder: The New Maudsley Skills-Based Training Manual provides a framework for carer skills workshops which can be used by anyone working with these conditions.

Confidence to Care: A Resource for Family Caregivers Providing Alzheimer’s Disease Or Other Dementias Care at Home – Molly Carpenter

Confidence to Care A Resource for Family Caregivers Providing Alzheimer's Disease Or Other Dementias Care at Home

Confidence to Care is the essential handbook for the family caregiver offering practical insights to understanding, managing and preventing the behavioral symptoms associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Touching, personal stories come together with practical and easy-to-access tips and techniques drawn from decades of caregiving experience by internationally-recognized experts.

Guide to Mental Health for Families and Carers of People with Intellectual Disabilities – Geraldine Holt, Anastasia Gratsa, Nick Bouras

Guide to Mental Health for Families and Carers of People with Intellectual Disabilities

A practical and comprehensive introduction for carers to mental health problems, this accessible guide outlines a range of signs and symptoms of mental health problems that can affect people with intellectual disabilities. The guide explains why mental health problems develop, and advises on what can be done to help people with intellectual disabilities and carers themselves.

Living with Dying: A Complete Guide for Caregivers – Jahnna Beecham, Katie Ortlip

Living with Dying A Complete Guide for Caregivers

  • This easy-to-use guide for caregiving instructs you how to:
  • Have the conversation
  • Navigate the emotional and spiritual journey
  • Control pain
  • Address symptoms
  • Work with hospice
  • Care for yourself
  • Get your loved one’s affairs in order

Mindfulness for Carers: How to Manage the Demands of Caregiving While Finding a Place for Yourself – Cheryl Rezek

Mindfulness for Carers How to Manage the Demands of Caregiving While Finding a Place for Yourself

Carers are particularly vulnerable to feeling stressed, worried and worn down by the vast demands that often come with caregiving, be they physical, psychological or emotional. Mindfulness can be enormously beneficial to carers, whether professional or voluntary, as a means of developing greater inner stability, resilience and gaining more control over their thoughts, feelings and emotions.

No Saints Around Here: A Caregiver’s Days – Susan Allen Toth

No Saints Around Here A Caregiver's Days

When we promise “in sickness and in health,” it may be a mercy that we don’t know exactly what lies ahead. Forcing food on an increasingly recalcitrant spouse. Brushing his teeth. Watching someone you love more than ever slip away day by day. As her husband James’s Parkinson’s disease with eventual dementia began to progress, writer Susan Allen Toth decides she intensely wants to keep her husband at home—the home he designed and loved and lived in for a quarter century—until the end.

Self-Care for Caregivers: A Twelve Step Approach – Pat Samples, Diane Larsen, Marvin Larsen

Self-Care for Caregivers A Twelve Step Approach

For those serving as a caregiver for a loved one, the authors of this down-to-earth, encouraging book can help you make the most of the experience without losing yourself in the process.

Supporting Families and Carers: A Nursing Perspective – Mary E. Braine, Julie Wray

Supporting Families and Carers A Nursing Perspective

Understanding the perspective of carers is an essential aspect of nursing. Supporting Families and Carers: A Nursing Perspective offers insights into the fundamental principles of caring for families and carers irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality or religion.

Take Care, Son: The Story of My Dad and his Dementia – Tony Husband

Take Care, Son The Story of My Dad and his Dementia

Hi Dad . . . can we have a chat about your dementia . . . Can you remember how it started?
When Ron Husband started to forget things – dates, names, appointments . . . daft things, important things – it took a while to realise that this was ‘a different form of forgetting’. But it was just the first sign of the illness that gradually took him away from the family he loved.

The Carer’s Handbook: Essential Information and Support for All Those in a Caring Role – Jane Matthews

The Carer's Handbook Essential Information and Support for All Those in a Caring Role

This indispensable guide aims to be a one-stop-shop for the huge percentage of the population who, now or later, find themselves in a caring role, whether that involves shopping for a housebound neighbour, or giving up work to care full-time for a disabled child or confused parent.

The Complete Carer’s Guide – Bridget McCall

The Complete Carer's Guide

There are around six million carers in the UK, a figure estimated to reach nine million by 3037. Being a carer can be rewarding, but it is often stressful and exhausting: it involves a range of tasks, such as providing personal care, managing medication and ensuring that the needs of the person being cared for are met. This practical, much needed guide discusses how to ensure that you have a life of your own while caring, how to make informed decisions and, most importantly, how to access the support and help you need.

The Essential Carer’s Guide – Mary Jordan

The Essential Carer_s Guide

Illustrated with individual case stories, this book covers physical, social, and financial needs, across the stages of immediate, intermediate and advanced care. It is useful as a practical companion for those caring for, or responsible for the care of, an elderly friend or relative.
The Selfish Pigs guide to caring – Hugh Marriot

The Selfish Pigs guide to caring

Over six million people in the UK…provide unpaid care for disabled or elderly relatives, friends or neighbours. Their job is long, lonely and hard, yet there is limited support and no formal training. As a result, carers suffer frequent damage to physical and mental health. Oddly, though carers by definition are anything but selfish pigs, they are liable to feelings of guilt, probably brought on by fatigue and isolation.

Where There is No Psychiatrist: A Mental Health Care Manual – Vikram Patel

Where There is No Psychiatrist A Mental Health Care Manual

Even though mental illnesses are common and cause great suffering in every part of the world, many health workers have a limited understanding about mental health and are less comfortable dealing with mental illness. This book is a practical manual for mental health care for the community health worker, the primary care nurse, the social worker and the primary care doctor, particularly in developing countries.

Young Carers and their Families: Working Together for Children, Young People and Their Families – Saul Becker, Jo Aldridge, Chris Dearden

Young Carers and their Families Working Together for Children, Young People and Their Families

Young carers are children and young people under the age of 18 who provide care for an ill or disabled parent or relative in the community, usually within their own home. They perform many of the same domestic, caring and other duties as adult carers but often without the recognition and support received by many adult carers.

The Care Act 2014

care-act-2014Welcome to another blog post. This time I want to focus on the Care Act. The Care Act 2014 is a major piece of legislation to put unpaid carers wellbeing as a priority. Carers have faced hardship and lack of identification regarding their needs for a long time.

When I talk of unpaid carers, I am talking about those who are caring for a loved one, relative, close friend or even neighbour. The Care Act 2014 heavily focuses on those who are WILLING to care and tries to avoid the casual carer. Unpaid carers go through so much and there are unfortunately still major problems with the Care Act.

The main focus for the Care Act is that

– Carers are entitled to a carer assessment
– Puts carers on an equal footing with the cared for
– Increases identification of the carer needing support

If you have the time to watch the video I have made explaning some of the basic parts of the Care Act 2014, then please do so by clicking on the video below.

The video covers the following

  • The main focus for the Care Act.
  • What carers need support on.
  • Problems with the care act.
  • What you or your family can do regarding carer assessments.
  • Local Authorities responsibilities.
  • How carer needs are provided.
  • What happens if you refuses an assessment?
  • Care and support plans.
  • Safeguarding.
  • Independent advocacy.

Although I mention that the Local Authorities have responsibilites, so do health boards, mental health trusts, housing officers, social workers, assessors and so on.

The Care Act can be a major force for carers like myself up and down the country, but it is only as good if carers or carer advocates do not know their rights. There are those who will take every chance they can get to ignore the Care Act and misuse their powers to prey on the vulnerable and when I mean vulnerable, it is not just the carer alone, but also the cared for. Still not every carer is an angel and there are safeguarding issues in some families, but as it stands the Care Act looks to prevent such crisis before they happen.

Telling our carers story

blurred  Business Conference and Presentation. Audience in the conference hall. Business and Entrepreneurship.

If you are a carer or have been caring for someone for a while. It is important to acknowledge that you have been through some pretty difficult times. Yes, of course there has been some good times, times where carers can celebrate what they have done for those they care for.  There has also been times when the ‘cared for’ should be congratulated for moving forward with their recovery, however we must admit that there have been things in the past that require special attention.

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The A to Z of Carers

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Hope you like reading my blog posts and if this is the first time you have managed to visit, welcome.  It has been a while since I did a post about carers and I just recently made a video regarding the world of carers or perhaps what we could call mental health carers, those being carers who look after someone suffering mental distress or worse a severe mental health condition.

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50 ways to cope as a carer

Matthew Mckenzie (2)Welcome to another blog post from a carer in South London. It has been a while since I have last posted anything, but this is due to spending my attention making videos on my video channel. I have also been quite busy editing my newspaper, which is always worth a read.

Anyway, I thought to post ways to cope as a carer. Basically a carer is someone looking after a loved one, or someone close. An important fact is carers are unpaid and often have to struggle to get recognition. A carer is not a care worker, they are unpaid and not emotionally attached to who they work for.

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Tips for Mental Health Professionals when dealing with carers

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I have decided to exercise my carers voice and produce 10 tips for mental health staff to take note of when working with carers. These are free for mental health professionals to explore and I have tried to keep them close to some of the aspects on Triangle of care from Carer’s Trust, which is an amazing piece of strategy geared towards supporting mental health carers.

 

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Carers rights day 2016

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Welcome to another blog post by Matthew Mckenzie, a carer over in the south of London. Around late November 2016, I did a video to help promote “Carers Rights day”.  I have also been meaning to write up about the video in my blogsite, but never had gotten around to it. I must admit that I have been rather busy, mainly raising awareness of carers.

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New podcasts released

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Hello Everyone, It has been a while since I have last done some blogging.  I have been fairly busy, but as you might already know.  I have a new podcast channel and have made some podcasts regarding carers.

I usually try and release a podcast once a week, especially on weekends.  I am hoping to push this to twice a week and if I am lucky, I ll try get some interviews in and guest podcasters.  As for now, my main focus is blogging and trying to compile new videos off my YouTube channel.

 

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