Unpaid careers get £250k respite fund
Unpaid carers in Richmond will benefit from an extra £250,000 to pay for breaks away from caring.
An underspend of Richmond Council’s adult social care budget by £500,000 meant half the savings could be allocated to the carers’ break budget.
Councillor Nicola Urquhart, cabinet member for adult services, said the budget was for unpaid carers who lived in or cared for someone in Richmond.
Singing brings harmony to sufferers of dementia
Dementia is not something anyone would like to associate with their own future.
Rutland Reminders’ volunteers get together for a singing session. They are from left, Clare Hitchcox, Pam Houlden, Janet Berridge, Dr Charles Lawrence, Diana Ellard, Ann Thomas, Mike Gee, Ruth Thomas-Twinn and Gill Lawrence.
Dementia is not something anyone would like to associate with their own future.
Unless you have had direct experience of it, usually by way of an elderly relative, it’s a thing, like death, that most of us don’t like to think about.
And yet the World Heath Organisation describes dementia as the next global health time bomb: one in four people over 65 will develop it.
A huge worldwide increase in numbers is largely down to increased longevity. The Alzheimer’s Society estimates there are 800,000 sufferers in the UK, only a minority of whom have been diagnosed and who are mostly looked after by an estimated 600,000 unpaid carers.
Rutland Reminders is a group that was set up by a teacher in 2010 to help local sufferers.
‘there are times I could just run out the door’
As told to Joan McFadden Susan Love, a nurse, lives in Paisley with her husband Willie and 19-year-old son Owen, who has cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus. Here, she tells Owen about the love – and the guilt – she feels for him
You’ve always been a bit of a surprise to me, right from the moment I found out I was 26 weeks pregnant at the age of 19.
