SLaM – Handbook for Families and Carers

Families and carers play a vital role supporting people with mental health problems or with an addiction to drugs or alcohol. So, as well as providing people who use our services with care and treatment, we also see it as our job to support you as a carer or family member. This involves listening to your experience so we can get you the most appropriate type of help and support.

We know that this role can sometimes be difficult, demanding and lonely, and we know that there may be times when you need help and support. This handbook will help you to find the help and support you need.

Are You A Carer?

This booklet details the types of support available through Southwark Carers. The booklet explains our core services including Information, Advice and Support Services, Advocacy, Counselling, Support and Activity Group, Financial Assistance and Grants, Respite Care and Emergency Planning Support.

Are you a young carer?

A Southwark Carers booklet that details the advice and support available to young carers in the borough. The young carers booklet looks at help available through schools, charities and social services to support a young carer through their lives.

Working Carers

As a carer, you may currently be juggling caring with paid work. You may be considering giving up work so that you can continue to care, or your role as a carer may have recently ended and you are looking for work.

It is important that you know your rights and the options available to you when making decisions about caring and paid employment. In this booklet, you will find information on staying in work, giving up work and returning to work.

Hospital Discharge Planning Advice

This booklet is designed to provide the carer with information about the discharge from hospital process. When your cared for person is being discharged from hospital it can be a very distressing and confusing time.

It may be you are becoming a care for the first time. Or if you were caring for that person before, you may now face changes to your caring role.

Planning for Emergencies

We have designed this guide to be a way of helping you think about some of the things that may be important to you should you be unable to continue in your caring role.

Emergency Planning is where you sit down either by yourself or with someone and think about what would be needed should you be unable to care for your loved one.

Can Counselling Help?

Being a Carer can be a challenging role. At times it can evoke distress, frustration and anger. We all live through difficult and distressing events or experience painful feelings.

The counsellor’s role is to help you gain a greater understanding and awareness of yourself and the problems you have to face.

Personalisation: A Guide for Carers

Personalisation means making sure that everyone has access to the right information and advice to help them make decisions about care and support.

This guide explains the five main stages to getting the support you need.

Princess Royal Trust for Carers

The Princess Royal Trust for Carers was created on the initiative of Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal in 1991. At that time people caring at home for family members or friends with disabilities and chronic illnesses were scarcely recognised as requiring support.

For nearly 20 years, The Princess Royal Trust for Carers has been fighting to provide carers with the support they so desperately need. The Trust understands that few of us plan to become carers, so when a caring role starts, every carer needs an expert to guide them through the maze of services, rules and entitlements. For a carer, this can make the difference between keeping and losing their job, or between staying healthy and collapsing under the stress.

At the heart of The Trust is a unique network of 144 independently-managed Carers’ Centres, 89 young carers’ services and interactive websites (www.carers.org and www.youngcarers.net) which deliver around the clock support to over 424,000 carers and approximately 28,500 young carers.

Carers UK

Carers UK is a charity set up to help the millions of people who care for family or friends.

At some point in our lives every one of us will be involved in looking after an older relative, a sick friend or a disabled family member. Six million people in the UK are caring right now but whilst caring is part and parcel of life, without the right support the personal costs of caring can be high.

Caring can take its toll on your finances, your health, your career and your family and your social life. Carers can fall out of paid work and many rely on low-level benefits, forcing them into poverty.

Yet without unpaid carers our NHS would collapse and the country would face an £119 billion care bill it cannot afford. Carers are contributing so much to their communities by looking after the people they love, yet in return they face ignorance, isolation and little or no support. This has to stop. It cannot be fair that those who contribute so much are valued so little. Carers UK wants society to respect, value and support carers.