Best Practice

Ealing Carers Partnership is part of Carers Trust Hillingdon and Ealing, providing support services to unpaid carers across the borough of Ealing by offering respite and wellbeing activities. 

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A carer is defined as “a person of any age, adult or child, who provides unpaid support to a partner, child, relative, or friend who couldn’t manage to live independently or whose health or wellbeing would deteriorate without this help. This could be due to frailty, disability or serious health condition, mental ill health or substance misuse.”

Despite more awareness of carers and the vital support they provide, there are still many carers who remain hidden. There are a number of reasons for this such as lack of identification, culture of secrecy, inconsistent support from other services and carers not seeing themselves as carers.

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You might wonder why it is important to find hidden carers and there are a variety of reasons for this. For us the primary reason is that carers have poor health and wellbeing outcomes, so it is vital that all carers can access the support available to them. It is also important to consider that the Centre for Care found the economic value of unpaid carers to be £184 billion per year, which is the equivalent care value of a second NHS.

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As part of our project, we are looking at the barriers to access, along with how hidden carers can be best engaged. Since the project started in February this year, we have seen significant progress and have helped to identify over 200 carers that were previously hidden.

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To build on the success of this we will be producing a bi-monthly update detailing our capacity building journey and how professionals can use social care research within their practice.