WHY WE NEED TO SUPPORT THE CARERS

We keep going on about it, but we at Miranda Smith Homecare believe that early intervention and the help of one on one care improves the likelihood of dementia clients staying at home longer. We also believe that if we invest more into family/non-paid caregivers they will help reduce government or state spending: The following quote was reported by AP from Dr Shekhar Saxena of the World Health Organisation: “And rich countries should reconsider the drive to place dementia patients in institutions," said Saxena. "That's a mistake that some developed countries have made that is neither financially viable nor providing the best care," he said. To Saxena, the increasing rate of dementia is a "paradox" of medical progress. "The better we do, the more we expect to have problems with dementia and we need to be prepared for that." The following passage is taken from the World Health Organisation's report: A Public Health Priority. Dementia has an immense impact on the lives of the family, and particularly the person who takes the primary role in providing care. Most care is provided by family and other informal support systems in the community and most caregivers are women. However, changing population demographics may reduce the availability of informal caregivers in the future. The provision of care to a person with dementia can result in significant strain for those who provide most of that care. The stressors are physical, emotional and economic. A range of programmes and services have been developed in high-income countries to assist family caregivers and to reduce strain. The beneficial effects of caregiver interventions in decreasing the institutionalisation of the care recipient have been clearly demonstrated. Evidence from LMIC also suggests that home-based support for caregivers of persons with dementia, emphasizing the use of locally-available low-cost human resources, is feasible, acceptable and leads to significant improvements in caregiver mental health, and in the burden of caring. Despite evidence of effectiveness, there have been no successful examples of scale-up in any of the health systems in which the evaluative research has been conducted. Support is needed to enable informal caregivers to be able to continue in their role for as long as possible. Support includes information to aid understanding, skills to assist in caring, respite to enable engagement in other activities, and financial support.