Carers are supported and enabled to make decisions about their wish to continue to care.

You are offered the space and time to consider your caring role, with personalised support and as needed an offer of respite from your caring role.

For extra information, evidence and best practice please scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Regional offerings

Dementia Wellbeing Plan for Greater Manchester; Dementia United

The Greater Manchester dementia wellbeing plan promotes personalised planning conversations with people living with dementia and carers about their needs and wants. The plan ensures an improved standard of care planning for people living with dementia and also facilitates sharing across the system. It will be available as a standardised plan which can be accessed and shared digitally between practitioners; as well as being available from the website for people affected by dementia to be using when having person centred care plan reviews
Weblink: https://dementia-united.org.uk/dementia-wellbeing-plan/

Let's talk about death, shall we?

A new creative tool to support people with dementia: Polly Kaiser, consultant psychologist, has worked with award-winning illustrator, Tony Husband, and dementia trainer, Linda Green, to produce a cartoon booklet which helps people to prepare for the end of life.

Website: https://www.penninecare.nhs.uk/application/files/2415/8151/4384/Dementia_end_of_life_leaflet.pdf

Manchester Macmillan Supportive and Palliative Care Community Service

Palliative care is care given to people with chronic, often life-limiting illness. Our focus is on improving quality of life. We have a city wide service that provides seamless care. The service is delivered by MLCO staff in partnership with Macmillan Cancer Support.

Who is the service for?

Our service is usually for people whose illness means they are thought to be in the last year of life. However, we also provide care for people with longer life-limiting illness. We also provide support to families and carers. This is a really important part of supporting patients.

What does the service provide?

The service works from three hubs across Manchester so our teams work in their local neighbourhoods. The hubs are located in North, Central and South Manchester.

The teams provide support for adults facing life-limiting illness who are registered with a Manchester GP. The most common example is cancer, but our teams support patients with other conditions. We visit patients in their own home or care home. We also provide telephone support and advice when required.

The teams recognise that emotional, family, financial and spiritual concerns may be just as important to you as physical problems. We can:

Provide treatment and advice to help manage any symptoms
Offer practical advice and support to do the things that are important to you
Support families and carers
Signpost to other services including financial advice
Support you to make choices and plan for your future.

Website: https://www.manchesterlco.org/services/citywide-adult-community-services/manchester-macmillan-supportive-and-palliative-care-service/

Manchester Macmillan Supportive and Palliative Care Service Adult Referral Form: Macmillan Referral Form July final version

National offerings

ReSPECT for healthcare professionals

ReSPECT stands for Recommended Summary Plan for Emergency Care and Treatment. The ReSPECT process creates a summary of personalised recommendations for a person’s clinical care in a future emergency in which they do not have capacity to make or express choices. Such emergencies may include death or cardiac arrest, but are not limited to those events. The process is intended to respect both patient preferences and clinical judgement. The agreed realistic clinical recommendations that are recorded include a recommendation on whether or not CPR should be attempted if the person’s heart and breathing stop.

Website: https://www.resus.org.uk/respect/respect-healthcare-professionals

Evidence

Greater Manchester Carers Charter 2018: The role of GPs and the wider primary care workforce is recognised as being paramount in supporting carers and maintaining the capacity of carers to care if they so choose. There is a need to improve the registration and assessment of carers, including young carers, in primary care so their needs can be identified quickly before their health and wellbeing deteriorate. Primary care has a unique opportunity to make a telling contribution to improving the lives of carers.

The Care Act 2014 gives local authorities a responsibility to assess a carer’s needs for support, where the carer appears to have such needs. This replaces the existing law, which says that the carer must be providing ‘a substantial amount of care on a regular basis’ in order to qualify for an assessment. This will mean more carers are able to have an assessment, comparable to the right of the people they care for.

The local authority will assess whether the carer has needs and what those needs may be. This assessment will consider the impact of caring on the carer. It will also consider the things that a carer wants to achieve in their own day-to-day life. It must also consider other important issues, such as whether the carer is able or willing to carry on caring, whether they work or want to work, and whether they want to study or do more socially.

If both the carer and the person they care for agree, a combined assessment of both their needs can be undertaken. When the assessment is complete, the local authority must decide whether the carer’s needs are ‘eligible’ for support from the local authority. In the case of carers, eligibility depends on the carer’s situation. The carer will be entitled to support if:

they are assessed as having needs that meet the eligibility criteria
the person they care for lives in the local authority area (which means their established home is in that local authority area)

The local authority and the carer will agree a support plan, which sets out how the carer’s needs will be met. This might include help with housework, buying a laptop to keep in touch with family and friends, or becoming a member of a gym so that the carer can look after their own health. It may be that the best way to meet a carer’s needs is to provide care and support directly to the person that they care for, for example, by providing replacement care to allow the carer to take a break. It is possible to do this as long as the person needing care agrees.

Carers UK Assessment factsheet. Your guide to getting help and support in England: The support plan must include:

details of the needs identified in the assessment
which needs meet the eligibility criteria
which needs the local council is going to meet, and how the outcomes that you want to achieve
information about the personal budget available (the amount of money that the local council has worked out it will cost to arrange the necessary support for you)
information about direct payments
information and advice to support you in your role as a carer and address your needs.