Age Unlimited

Carers UK: Workplace Carers Network

Katherine Wilson - 19.10.2011

As one of the ten Age Unlimited projects, our mission is to help employers support carers through our Employers for Carers service. Thanks to support from NESTA, we're building on this offering by helping older carers extend their working lives and combine their caring and work commitments healthily and productively.

One in five people who give up work or take early retirement do it to care for family members. We're developing an online carers' network to provide advice and information to carers, link them up with colleagues for peer to peer support and signpost sources of help outside the workplace. We're currently working with the London Fire Brigade to develop and trial this within their workplace. Once the NESTA funded stage of the project comes to an end, we'd like to roll this out to other employers.

It has been a challenging but really enjoyable and useful learning experience so far - and it feels like we've travelled a long way since December 2009 when we first came along to NESTA with our idea! Now we're looking forward to launching our service later this year. So what have we been learning along the way?

New methods and ways of thinking really spring to mind - especially around how we involve potential users and purchasers of our service. As the project has developed, we've seen how inclusive methods of doing things can help generate interest, involvement and subsequently enthusiasm for wider cultural change. So we've learnt it's not just what you do but how you do it that counts.

At first, methods such as 'co-design', 'prototyping', 'blueprinting' and 'storyboards' sounded rather daunting! But we've seen - through using them - that they're actually very creative, adaptable and practical ways of developing, testing and communicating ideas. We've been hit by some challenges on the project because of external events but we've been able to create new opportunities - using these methods - to continue developing and testing our service and this has been a real bonus.

Involving potential users and purchasers early on has also been important. It's not necessarily been a very comfortable experience as it's raised lots of questions, particularly around how we ensure carers with challenging front line jobs (such as fire fighters) become aware of our service and are able to use it. But it's given us some really useful insights. We're also recognising how time invested now will be time saved later as our service grows more robust, usable and sustainable.

The other learning that's been helpful is the work we've done with NESTA to define impacts and outcomes. It's forced us to identify the real priorities and will prove useful when we come to evaluate the success of the project with the London Fire Brigade.

And finally! We were initially a bit daunted by the need to record our learning and send in regular project reports. But we now believe it's been really useful to capture our learning as we go. It's allowed us to develop a really helpful model for developing other services in the future, as well as roll out the working carers' network more widely.

So, in conclusion, we've been kept on our toes but it's definitely been worth the exercise!