Support 100 People Care for their Loved Ones

Your generous donations have helped enable us to continue to deliver our project supporting carers looking after someone near the end of their life.

The project is a special carers’ service designed to provide dedicated casework support to carers aged 18 or over, who are looking after someone in the later years of life.

For this project, the person being looked after would either:

• Have been diagnosed with a terminal illness, or
• Is 80 or over, and has general frailty and/or co-existing conditions, or
• Is in a residential or nursing home.

Death does not need to be a taboo. 

I have found that most carers in the project welcome the opportunity to open-up and share their hopes and fears around death.

This could include their worries about what may happen to their cared-for if they died first, and how they would readjust to life without caring.

It is not so much about people not wanting to talk about death, dying and bereavement – it is more a case of with who to talk to about it – and how.

 As part of the project we have run popular workshops covering topics including:

• Will writing;
• Advance care planning & funeral costs;
• Talking about death and planning the last years of life;
• Benefits for carers of older people;
• How to make better use your smart phone.

We have also worked with two end of life carers to produce a short practical guide for preparing or dealing with a death and produced brief information sheets on Lasting Power of Attorney, Advance Decision to Refuse Treatment and what to do when someone dies.