13/06/2026
📣Launching today: CARER FRIENDLY COMMUNITIES AND SHORT BREAKS
Focusing on this year’s Carers Week theme of building carer friendly communities, the briefing, published alongside Shared Care Scotland , presents how short breaks access and provision can be further developed by communities that are carer friendly.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to short breaks. Diversity amongst unpaid carers and their caring roles and responsibilities calls for a wide range of short breaks options, ensuring all carers can access breaks that offer rest, leisure and time. Communities that cultivate recognition, understanding and support for unpaid carers can help to alleviate and even prevent some of the challenges unpaid carers face when accessing breaks, for example the cost of services, lack of choice and feelings of guilt. Through collective action, these communities provide unpaid carers with spaces where they can be valued and supported. This creates equal opportunities for unpaid carers and empowers them to achieve life balance.
As the Right to a Break progresses towards delivery for unpaid carers, they must be at the heart of decision-making locally and nationally. Through carer friendly communities, unpaid carers can have more options and types of short breaks: a “market” that develops to not only help meet demand but also ensure unpaid carers can access the right breaks for them and be supported to do so. In turn, this prevents crisis, reduces isolation and supports carers’ health and wellbeing.
Read the briefing paper here:
https://www.carersuk.org/media/nzeins4v/short-breaks-and-carer-friendly-communities.pdf
