Help and support
Carer Passports
Carers UK has been busy working on a new project with The Department
of Health and Social Care and Carers Trust – the Carer Passport scheme.
Designed to help local areas introduce Carer Passports in five key settings
- hospitals, employment, community, education and mental health
trusts – a Carer Passport is essentially a record which identifies a carer in
some way and leads to provision of support, services or other benefits in
response.
A Carer Passport scheme:
• Identifies carers
• Connects carers with support
• Provides a relevant service or offer to carers
• Works for carers, for organisations and for
the wider community too
Visit the website for more information
and free resources about all of the
ways Carer Passports can be used:
www.carerpassport.uk
One of the most valuable
uses for a Carer Passport
scheme is in an employment
setting. Around three million
of us in the UK combine
work with unpaid caring
responsibilities, including
two million who work
full-time and one million
part-time 1 . While part-time
working is much more
common amongst carers
than non-carers, carers
are also more likely to stop
working altogether as they
struggle to switch to part-
time hours. Most carers are
of working age and the peak
age for caring (50–64) often
coincides with the peak of
4
our careers.
What is a Carer Passport in
employment?
Today, one in nine people in
any workplace are juggling
work with caring for older,
ill or disabled loved ones.
If your employer is part of
the Carer Passport scheme,
it is essentially a way of
starting a conversation
about how you can
combine work and care.
This conversation involves
balancing the needs of the
individual with the needs of
the business, within existing
company policies. The Carer
Passport also provides a
straightforward way to keep
a record of the flexibility
and support that you agree,
so it can be carried into an
employee’s future roles,
without having to repeat the
same conversations, which
can be frustrating!
Consistency
Those frustrations can come
when policies and provisions
for carers at work, where
they do exist, are not always
promoted to line managers
and staff, or understood or
applied consistently. This
can become more obvious
when a staff member
moves to a different team,
carersuk.org