Community Pot Fund: Bath and North East Somerset Carers Centre

The Carers' Centre aims to support carers of all ages in B&NES. It provides a range of advice and support directly to over 4,500 carers a year, all of whom are caring for a seriously ill or disabled family member, over 700 are aged between 5-25.

What are they doing?

This project will support local carers to identify the issues that are important to them from their experience of caring for a loved one who uses health and social care services.

Issues that carers regularly identify are: 

• that services do not listen or include carers in the planning and delivery of health and social care for their loved ones,
• that there is currently no Carers Strategy for Bath and North East Somerset,
• the level of quality of provision of health and social care for their loved ones and
• that carers and the people they care for get a good level of information when they are using health and social care as they often identify that services can be hard to navigate

Adult Carers will develop their own proactive plan and gain training from participation organisation Learn to Lead, who worked with the young carers group last year and supported them to make their own plan. Young carers also will be supported to update their plans and leadership skills.

The outcomes from this project will be for carers of all ages to:

• have greater influence on local services to improve them for patients and users,
• be more proactive rather than just reacting when services want to hear from carers,
• increase their confidence to participate and get their voices heard,
• increase their leadership skills and 
• increase their ability to write, monitor and successfully implement their own workplan

The aim of the project is for the carers involved to develop solutions to the problems they face and tackle some of these issues directly with commissioners and/or providers.