Pembrokeshire and Carmarthen Mind

Congratulations

Pembrokeshire and Carmarthen Mind are committed to supporting unpaid carers. We recognise the impact that this responsibility has on a carer's mental health and the challenges carers face when navigating the referral systems.

an excellent support service for both carers and service usersby providing information and support to them. Their work is considered of great importance by the board of trustees.

Anwen Little - Trustee

Owing to this commitment, 18 months ago we decided to work towards the Local Authority’s Investors in Carers Award. We have now achieved the Bronze level award and we are heading toward the Silver Award.

This process has highlighted to us as an organisation the complex nature of this role, how essential unpaid carers are for our society and how isolating and confusing a carer's journey can be.

As part of our journey, we initially did some research into what additional services carers in Carmarthen wanted access to. This research showed us that generally, carers didn’t want a new service but they did want some streamlining of existing services because many carers stated that they get confused with all the form filling and knowing what exact support each organisation is offering. This increases their already high-stress levels.

Owing to this we decided to work towards the Bronze level award. Ensuring all our staff are more aware of the needs of carers. To this end, we registered with the local authority and we were supported to ensure that we covered all the points in the 6 sections of the award:

• Carer Lead
• Staff Training
• Carer Identification
• Carer Information
• Carer Support and
• Evaluation.

We have carer's notice boards in place to help our service users gain access to information and we recognised a need for a Carers Mental Health pack. We collated this in an attempt to bring the key processes of registering as a carer with a G.P., applying for carer’s cards and carer’s assessments, access to mental health tips and signposting to other carer’s organisations together into one simple and useful guide. This has proved to be a very popular booklet and we give it out to service users and other support organisations have also found it helpful.

We have learned so much along this journey and feel that our service has grown in quality because of the deeper understanding of the carer's needs and services.

We actively encourage other organisations to join in with this scheme so that carers can be supported consistently across the counties.