About Unpaid Carers Improvement

The Unpaid Carer’s Improvement Programme aims to support health and social care staff to have the skills, knowledge and confidence to identify, involve and support carers to ensure that health and care services are designed and delivered to meet the needs of unpaid carers.

Scotland has up to 1.1 million people involved in providing unpaid care, and this has increased – and become more challenging - as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unpaid carers play a vital role in underpinning our health and social care system, and it is important to ensure they are well-supported and involved in care decisions at every level, particularly as part of health and social care integration.

We take a multi-disciplinary approach to:

Improving carer involvement across Health
Supporting quality planning of local carer services
Improving local carer assessment and quality data collection

Examples of Good Practice: Supporting Unpaid Carers

We currently have the following resources available on improving carer involvement in hospital discharge:

We are also producing a number of impact stories that demonstrate good practice in carer involvement and support, and quality planning of local carer services. You can find these in our Tools and Resources section.

These resources are available for all local teams looking to improve carer involvement in health.