Carers Week is not Carers' Week but Carers week
Zibiah Loakthar, our Cuimhne Coordinator writes:
C U I M H N E
A dvocates for
R espect
E mpathy and
S upport for Carers
Carers Week this year is 6-12 June. This is a week where we can all focus our efforts in raising awareness of caring and make more visible to everyone the vital role carers play in our communities.
In a community we can all share responsibility for each other’s wellbeing. It is for all of us to reflect on the way we care for each other. We can all think what we could help do to support people in our community who may be living with health conditions, such as dementia, needing special care. But importantly, we can all also think about things we can do to support those taking up caring roles.
We know that in our Irish community there are many people quietly taking on important vital caring roles. People often take up these roles unpaid, for family, friends and community members without any thought to seek recognition for this.
Many people in our community generously give their time and skills to caring for family and friends without self-identifying as “carers”. By helping people to identify as “carers” we can better make visible the huge contribution to caring made by our community.
family carers
People often take up a caring role as an act of love, or a sense of family responsibility; people do not always speak up about the challenges because of a wish not to sound like someone who is complaining or unhappy about the role they have taken on.
How can we can encourage unpaid carers to voice the challenges they face? And how can we give our support to ensuring carers voices are heard clearly not just within our network of community groups but also by policy makers, by people with useful resources to share and the wider community?
These are important conversations to have in our community. We know for instance that many people find themselves entering a caring role by surprise, when a family member becomes ill. With dementia, the caring role can be minimal at first but family members can find that the role places increasing demands on their time, and develop into what might feel like a 24/7 role.
Practical support
People can often find themselves taking up important caring roles with little preparation or practical support. Carers may find they are having to develop a wide range of skills from advocacy to physical lifting to communication skills to navigating the health care system network and yet find in reality they have only very limited access to mentoring and training and support.
Carers Week is a reminder to listen to the experiences of unpaid carers. It is also a week where we can all focus on thinking creatively about how to better resource support for people taking on caring roles.
There are lots of useful websites online where we might signpost individual carers in our community for information and support. But there are also bigger questions we can be asking in our Irish in Britain network:
What might we see as important to change about the whole conversation about caring?
How can we better share the responsibilities we have as human beings to care for each other across our community ?
How can we ensure we are caring for carers too?
What systemic changes may we collectively suggest for fair care in our society?
Irish in Britain's Cuimhne campaign have created a Carers Project with a wealth of resources and advice for carers and families of people living with dementia, including reminiscence materials.