Carers provide unpaid care and support for family and friends with an illness or disability. UK governments have set out carers’ rights, but those rights are difficult to uphold when resources are limited and need is great. Many carers are unhappy with the support they receive and feel their rights are not upheld. Carers’ rights include being supported through local authority carers’ assessments to discover their needs and identify support needed. We know that assessments happen less often than they should, practice varies within and between areas, and that support following an assessment varies greatly. Little is known about why this is so and what might be better ways of identifying present and future needs.
Background:
The aim of the study is to understand and delineate the varying approaches to carers’ assessments being undertaken in Wales, as well as how they are experienced by carers, through qualitative and quantitative methods. Using this information, we will map out how services and interventions can be evaluated at a national level with available and future routine data.
Our research questions are:
- How do social care practitioners understand and deliver carers’ needs assessments?
- How do Local Authority policies and practices in relation to carers align with current law and policies?
- How are carers’ needs assessments, and any subsequent provisions, experienced by carers and how could they be improved?
- Who receives carers needs assessments and how do they compare with the wider Welsh population of carers?
- What is the feasibility of using routinely collected data to evaluate interventions and services for unpaid carers in Wales?
Study methods and activities:
Our study has two work packages (WPs). Work package 1 will qualitatively assess the state of carers’ assessments in Wales. We will analyse documents from Local Authorities, Regional Partnership Boards and national guidelines to understand how carers assessments are delivered and support offered. Interviews with carers and practitioners in six Local Authorities will be used to explore experiences of the assessment process including understanding their purpose, as well as whether/how carer needs are identified and met. WP1 data will be coded and analysed to develop a descriptive typology of approaches to carers’ needs assessments across Local Authorities.
Work package 2 (WP2) will use data from the Unpaid Carers Receiving Assessment of Carer’s Needs (UCRS) Census which includes demographics and assessment details for carers. This data will be securely linked to health and social care datasets in the SAIL Databank to describe the population of carers receiving assessments and to compare them with the wider carer population. We will describe by demographic characteristics, assessment decisions and service provisions as well as presenting variations in assessments. Future theory-based evaluations of services and interventions for carers will be planned by developing logic models, which serve as a framework to identify components of the intervention and proposed outcomes, which we will map against available routine data sources.
WP1 will run throughout the 36-month project, with WP2 starting 18 months through to allow time for data to be ingested into SAIL for analysis.
CARE affiliation:
This project has benefitted from CARE’s connection to carers and has been informed by the Lived Experience Collective. It also draws on our partnership with Clinical Trials Research (CTR) at Cardiff University.
Public Involvement activities:
Both a carer advisory group including 6 carers and a separate oversight group comprised of policymakers and researchers will meet 12 times throughout the study.
Findings:
The project will begin in September 2026, so there are no findings yet.
Project Title:
Carers’ needs assessments: A mixed methods exploration of social care practice and outcomes for caring relationships
Research Leads:
Dr Jeremy Dixon – CARE
Dr Fiona Lugg-Widger – CTR
Research Members and collaborations:
Co-Investigators
Professor Ashley Akbari – Swansea University
Alice Butler – CARE, Cardiff University
Dr Dan Burrows – CARE/SOSSS, Cardiff University
Bobbie-Jo Haarhoff – Public co-applicant
Mike O Brien – Public co-applicant
Dr Stacey Rand – University of Kent
Dr Simon Read – Torfaen County Borough Council
Dr Diane Seddon – Bangor University
Funder(s):
NIHR Research Programme for Social Care
Funding amount:
£678,921
Project start date:
September 2026
Project end date:
August 2029
