Young Carers Awareness Day 2019
Young Carers Awareness Day
Each year Carers Trust organises a national Young Carers Awareness Day. This year the day will take place on Thursday 31 January 2019.
The purpose of the day is to raise public awareness of the challenges faced by young people because of their caring role, and to campaign for greater support for young carers and their needs.
The theme for this year is Young Carers mental health.
Here at Derbyshire Carers Association we provide the Young Carers Service for young carers across the county of Derbyshire.
Who are young carers?
A young carer is someone under 18 who helps look after someone in their family, or a friend, who is ill, disabled or misuses drugs or alcohol.
How many young carers are there?
There are 800,000 secondary school pupils in England with a caring role.
This means there are six young carers in every secondary school classroom.
What might a Young Carer do?
• Practical tasks, such as cooking, housework or shopping.
• Physical care, such as helping someone out of bed.
• Emotional support, such as talking to someone who is distressed.
• Personal care, such as helping someone dress.
• Managing the family budget and collecting prescriptions.
• Helping to give medicine.
• Helping someone communicate.
• Looking after brothers and sisters.
As part of our work with Young Carers we recently had the Young Carers we support take part in a music project.
This project was a series of workshops where the Young Carers wrote, recorded and produced their own song, they also have made a video for this song.
To celebrate Young Carers Awareness Day, the group will be interviewed on local radio. You can hear them on the radio and maybe catch their song being played on the following show on Thursday 31st January.
• Amber Sound – Trevor Middleton show around 7.15pm
Support for Young Carers
You can find out more about the support we offer for Young Carers by following the link below
Some photos of the music project
