Living and caring

Aim

We wanted to assess the impact of providing care on older people by comparing the experiences of carers and non-carers aged 50 and over.

Findings

• Carers who devoted more than 20+ hours a week to caring for family or friends, have a worse quality of life than non-carers.
• 25% of those providing moderate to heavy care found it hard to get to hospital, compared to just 10% of non-carers.
• 21% of those caring for a parent or parent-in-law had trouble getting to a GP, compared with only 2% of non-carers.
• People providing moderate to heavy care for a spouse or a child had much lower levels of family wealth.
• The average wealth of someone caring for a child or spouse was around £120,000. The average wealth of a non-carer was around £170,000.
• People caring for a spouse were far less likely to have gone on holiday than a non-carer in the last 12 months. They were also less likely to have taken a day trip in the UK.
• Carers were also more likely than non-carers to feel restricted in their leisure activities.

Methods

Drawing on the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, we used regression techniques to compare the experiences of carers and non-carers across five key policy domains.