About Carers Lewisham

Carers Lewisham supports anyone in the London Borough of Lewisham who, unpaid, looks after a mentally or physically ill or disabled relative or friend. We support carers aged 8-98 with a range of services including advice, information, emotional support, breaks, opportunities to meet other carers, time out from caring activities such as relaxation days and well being sessions; coping strategies, specialist support for parent carers, carer of people with dementia, carers of people with mental health problems, older carers and carers who are caring for someone who is nearing the end of their life. We currently support over 5000 carers over 500 of whom are children. We aim to build health caring communities.

Although we are an independent Charity we are also part of the Princess Royal Trust for Carers Network. This is Princess Anne’s charity which support carers by supporting carers organisations. Membership enables us to access funds and other support to improve how we support carers.

Carers Lewisham currently holds 3 quality marks for our work PQASSO for the general running of our charity; CLS for our advice and information services; and the PRTC Quality Mark for the support we provide to Adult and Child Carers.

Who is a Carer?

A carer is someone of any age who provides unpaid support to family or friends who could not manage without this help. This could be caring for a relative, partner or friend who is ill, frail, disabled or has mental health or substance misuse problems.

Carers may even be juggling paid work with their unpaid caring responsibilities at home. The term carer should not be confused with a care worker, or care assistant, who receives payment for looking after someone.

How Can We Help?

If you are a carer, your local Carers’ Centre may be able to help make things easier for you. Each centre delivers a wide range of local support services to meet the needs of carers in its community. These range from support services catered to the carer, the needs of the person you care for and the services your council may provide.

Carers have different needs and centres can assist you in information regarding health issues, entitlements, mobility, grants for holidays, equipment and support.

Here is a link to a video we put on YouTube a few years ago which show some of the things we do:

We also have a video animation showing Young Carers and their needs: