Carers make a major contribution to society. Estimates show that the care provided by friends and family members to ill, frail or disabled relatives is equivalent to £119 billion every year (Valuing Carers, Carers UK and Dr Lisa Buckner, University of Leeds). Sharing good practice and information greatly improves carers experience of services provided at a local level and provides peer support. Using local knowledge of what works well, commissioners can improve quality and continuity of services.

Using the above image as a scale where red is lowest and green is highest. How would you rate the below questions.

• How assured are you that you are using varied evidence regarding carers from different sources to support decisions on business cases for all your services?
• How assured are you as a CCG about benchmarking yourself with comparator localities or regions of good practice with regard to supporting carers?
• Having benchmarked your CCG against other comparators of good practice how assured are you that the services you commission support carers?

Ask yourself

• How do you make sure your business cases include carers in their submission criteria?
• Have you considered including carers in all your Equality Impact Assessments for all services you commission?
• Are you using data from local carers’ surveys to support your commissioning process?

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