Online carer support & measuring impact

There are eleven million unpaid carers in the UK - you will probably know somebody who's looking after their mum, dad, sibling, child or neighbour. Frustratingly, only a tiny portion - between 10% and 15% - of those carers are accessing the support guaranteed to them by the Care Act.

It's no surprise, therefore, that the primary challenge for any carer-supporting organisation (CSO) is to find new ways of identifying carers. But we mustn't forget to ask, "So what?" - If somebody does ultimately choose to identify with the bureaucratic term 'carer' (as opposed to 'wife', 'husband', 'son' or 'daughter'), what difference will it make to their situation?This question is particularly pertinent for the team here at Mobilise. As an entirely online service, we need to be thoughtful about the impact we can expect to have for carers.

In a recent poll, we found that the top priority for carers in our community was access to respite breaks, which obviously require in-person support of some kind. Our focus is indeed on the breadth, not the depth, of support - it's no accident that we've reached over 300,000 people with our carer support offer. 70% of carers accessing our personalised guide haven't previously accessed any support for their caring role, and 66% are working age.

\We genuinely believe that a little can go a long way for carers - if it comes early enough in their journey. That's why we've been working with Dr Claire McCallum (Research Fellow at?Zinc.VC?and Honorary Digital Health Lecturer at the University of Bristol) and Philipp Friemann (PhD candidate and Policy Fellow at the LSE) to explore the impact of light-touch, early stage interventions for carers that can be scaled effectively to millions of users.

Our initial work has focused on the Mobilise email course - a simple, accessible tool that's given 8,500 carers a quick round-up of the basis they might need to know.Aided by the carers in our community, we measured four domains as priorities to measure the progress of individuals across the course:

• knowledge of how to make time to look after themselves
• awareness of available support and information
• consideration of emergency plans
• social connectedness with people who understand what it is like to be a carer.

Using a simple pre/post survey across the five-week email course, we identified that?76% of responding carers improved in at least one domain, while 64% saw an improvement in at least two.?