The project aims to co-develop alternative support pathways to provide older informal caregivers with long-term conditions who look after people with multimorbidity with new opportunities for rapid support before a crisis associated with caregiving occurs.

People are living longer. While a good thing, it means more of us are living with two or more long-term conditions (multimorbidity). To manage their everyday needs, people with multimorbidity commonly depend on the informal (unpaid) care of family and friends to maintain their independence and quality of life. Informal caregiving can affect caregivers, especially older caregivers who often have long-term conditions themselves. Considering our increasing dependency on informal care as we encounter an ageing population, providing accessible and tailored support services to older informal caregivers is critical.

Adult day-care centres provide essential respite for informal caregivers. Previous research has shown better psychosocial outcomes in informal caregivers benefiting from adult day-care services. In collaborating with local adult day-care centres and informal caregivers, we aim to identify older informal caregiver needs and priorities and co-develop alternative support pathway to pilot.

In partnering with a day-care centre and a community organisation supporting South Asian communities living with MLTC, we hosted four co-design workshops to identify unmet support needs and priorities of older informal carers. We explored potential support pathways and produced an intervention with supporting resources. Through this collaborative process, we created an alternative support pathway prototype, which includes the following components:

• Resources: Personalised materials and resources, which make part of a ‘Carer Box’, focused on signposting carers to local support services and providing practical tools to improve self-care and overall health and wellbeing.
• Services: A combination of group-based educational and psychosocial services concepts, with accompanying manuals and informational materials.