City Research Online

Abstract

Family caregivers are vital to enabling people with dementia to live longer in their own homes. For these caregivers, chatting with clinicians—being listened to empathetically and receiving reassurance—can be seen as not incidental but important to supporting them. This paper considers and identifies the significance of this relational work for family carers by re-examining data originally collected to document caregivers’ perspectives on quality in crisis response teams. This reveals that chatting, for family caregivers, comprises three related features: (i) that family caregivers by responding to a person’s changing and sometimes challenging needs and behaviors inhabit a precarious equilibrium; (ii) that caregivers greatly appreciate ‘chatting’ with visiting clinicians; and (iii) that while caregivers appreciate these chats, they can be highly critical of the institutionalized character of a crisis response team’s involvement with them.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Publisher Keywords:	dementia; family carers; community care; carer experiences; qualitative interviews
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry R Medicine > RT Nursing
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Nursing
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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