More education and training is needed for carers to help them cope with their role, according to the manager of the HSE West’s carers’ department.
Michelle Harrison said research indicates that both the amount of caregiving time each week and carers’ impaired sense of identity, ie, the isolation factor, are among the main factors in predicting the “breaking point” for carers.
“This burden can be so great that the caregiver eventually relinquishes their caring role and becomes incapable of providing the required level of care and the cared for person must be institutionalised and in some cases, this situation is preceded by an endless series of hospital visits.”
Speaking to mark national carers’ week, she stated that measures enabling greater availability of private time for carers, and improving care giving skills through training and education, are essential to help them cope on a day-to-day basis.
Figures, recently released, indicate that fulltime carers work more than three times longer than the average employed worker providing more than 5,720 hours of care per year to family members. This corresponds to 110 hours care per week or close to 16 hours caring per day.
It is well recognised that caring for an older person, someone with a disability, or for a person with a mental health problem, often places social, emotional, physical, psychological and financial pressures on the carer, outlined Sharon Deering, training unit manager with the Carers Association.
“For many family carers life can be even more stressful than for other people, as daily life is full of worries about finances, their own health, the health of the person they are caring for and whether or not they can keep on caring into the future.”
One of the most common requests, both the Carers Association and the carers department of the HSE West receives from carers, is for training to cope with the stress involved in providing care.
“It is very fitting therefore in the fourth Annual National Carers Week that we showed carers how much they are valued by providing carers from Galway city with a full day workshop dedicated to stress management which was held recently in the Menlo Park Hotel,” says Ms. Deering.
“The aim of the workshop was to provide carers with the tools and techniques to practice and live with peace and wellbeing. In addition, they gained a well rounded awareness of the effects of stress, anxiety and tension on the mind and body. Another positive outcome from the day was giving carers the opportunity to meet others in the same position as themselves. It can be easy for carers to imagine that they are on their own, caring in isolation, when in fact there are almost 161,000 carers in Ireland and Galway has the third highest proportion with 9,252 carers.”
Ms Deering says the investment in funding for carer related training will pay huge dividends in terms of improving the quality of care provided.
“Also, just as importantly, it will give carers a sense of the value of their contribution to Irish society, to their family, to the person being cared for and this could never be accounted for financially. As one very eloquent gentleman put it ‘When I started this training, I was just Joe Bloggs. When I finished, I was Joe Bloggs, carer and very proud of it!”
