Carers Week 2014
Wednesday, 11th June 2014
Approximately 6.5 million has an unpaid carers role in the UK today. Many of these individuals care for a friend or family member who is facing ill health, disability or frailty. Often they operate in this role for several hours in a day, sometimes round the clock, and commonly to the detriment of their own personal life, working life and possibly impeding on their own health and well being.
EDGE Services supports ‘Carers Week’ which runs from Monday 9th to Sunday 15th June 2014. This is a UK-wide annual awareness campaign to improve the lives of carers and the people they care for. It does this by raising awareness of carers at a national, regional and local level. Hundreds of organisations and individuals join in each year to make it one of the UK's most successful awareness campaigns.
“As a country, we vastly underestimate just how much caring is done,” said Helena Herklots, the Chief Executive of the charity Carers UK. “We sometimes think we’re an uncaring society. Well, 6.5m people caring suggests otherwise.”
Rather worryingly this figure is set to rise in the next few years as an ageing population needs looking after. Carers UK predict that there will be 9m carers in 20 years time.
It is generally believed the NHS would collapse without unpaid carers, who save the health service almost £120bn a year.
About 1.4m people in Britain spend more than 50 hours a week caring for someone, while more than 177,000 teenagers have caring responsibilities. It is certainly an issue that affects young and old.
Helena Herklots added “All of us at some point in our lives are either going to be caring for someone or need the help of a carer, so it’s in all our interests to get better support in place and to really recognise the huge contribution that carers make to our society. Sometimes it can happen very suddenly. You can be thrown into a whole different world that you’ve never had to think about before and it can feel quite frightening and very complex.”
“Carers deserve a better deal... they are struggling,” she said. “More carers are finding they are not getting the support that they need. Over half the carers say they aren’t getting enough support. If they can’t cope, it means the person they’re caring for might need additional help from a health service or social services. As well as being the right thing to do to support carers, it’s also economically the right thing to do.”
“We are living longer, which is good news, so the need for care from family and loved ones is increasing all the time but the support for carers to do that isn’t. And that’s not sustainable.”
“Many carers tell us they simply don’t have time to think about their own health because they’re so busy caring. You might feel you can never switch off. If we don’t do more to support carers then the situation will get worse for them and potentially for the people they are looking after as well. Its part of human nature that we want to care for each other but that has to not be at the cost of our own wellbeing.”
For further information go to www.carersweek.org