Exploring the care work and personal need narratives of older carers

Increasingly, older adults are undertaking carer roles to support other older people. They are doing this within the confusing world of healthcare consumerism, with different agencies providing different services and with variations in services across the UK. Understanding of the care work and needs of older carers is incomplete in relation to what they provide and what they believe they should seek help with. Therefore, it is important that nurses help older carers to narrate their care work and personal needs as part of an assessment of the self-care resources within the home. By doing so, nurses can better understand what support they might offer themselves and what assistance might be sought from other agencies. In this article, the author discusses the concepts of care agency and older carer narratives and describes how nurses might approach narrative enquiry by adopting the same principles used to develop person-centred care relationships.