Unpaid care for older people

The great majority of long-term care for older people is provided by unpaid carers. There are some 5.4 million unpaid carers of older people in England. ASCRU has conducted a study of attitudes to providing unpaid care to parents and has produced future projections of this unpaid care.

​AIMS

​​The aim is to explore a series of issues on unpaid care, including:

• • who provides unpaid care, 

• • for whom (person with care needs/carer relationship),

• • under what, circumstances,

• • whether and how care is shared within the family. 

A further aim is to develop and examine scenarios relating to the impact on demand for formal services of changes in the availability of unpaid care. This raises questions about how far a ‘shortfall’ in the supply of unpaid care relative to rising numbers of people needing formal care services would in practice be met by local authority funded care. 

METHODS

The methods will include consultation with stakeholders and unpaid carers, secondary analysis of relevant national surveys such as the Health Survey for England, further analysis of the ASCRU attitudes to caring survey, and interviews or focus groups. A new caring and attitudes to caring survey would be valuable, comprising partly the same questions as the previous attitudes survey in order to explore changes over time and partly some new questions to address new DHSC policy interests.