Skills for Care and Skills for Health, are working in partnership to strengthen the understanding of the health and social care workforce on the importance of carers in the delivery of health and social care services and to raise awareness of carers’ needs and issues across the wider workforce.

The Department of Health’s 2008 Strategy ‘Carers at the heart of the 21stcentury families and communities – a caring system on your side, a life of your own’, highlighted the need for a better understanding of carers issues for many people who come into contact with carers.

To achieve this a specific commitment was made to ensure that key workers would receive training to better support carers - helping employees to recognise that carers have a life of their own.

So what are we doing?
We are currently developing a national learning/training framework and guide for employers with supporting resources that can be used for developing or commissioning training on working with carers. These are based on a set of principles of good practice, which have been developed in consultation with carers, people working directly with carers, and interested parties across health, social care and other key sectors.

The resource will be made freely available across public, independent and voluntary services following development and testing in pilots in various settings across England. The piloting will take place between April to December 2010 in two stages - development and evaluation. Participants will help to shape the resource in order to ensure they are fit for purpose prior to the national launch. Carers will also be asked about the impact they feel this training has made as part of this process.

Want to know more? For more information visit www.skillsforcare.org.uk/carers
We have a virtual stakeholder group for this project that is open to anyone who wishes to contribute or simply keep up to date with the progress of this piece of work. If you would like to join please contact  carersstrategy@skillsforcare.org.uk

Who are Skills for Care and Skills for Health?
The role of Skills for Care is to ensure that the adult social care workforce has the skills and qualifications to deliver high quality social care. For more information about the work of Skills for Care visit our website

The role of Skills for Health is to help the health sector develop solutions that deliver a skilled, flexible and productive UK workforce in order to improve health and healthcare. For more information about Skills for Health and to access our products and tools visit us here