Mobilise is a platform aimed at creating “a little mind space” in everyday caring life. Unlike the present scattered and disconnected services, Mobilise provides seamless onboarding experience and personalised services for unpaid carers through community-based cross-sectoral collaboration.
Are you an “unpaid carer” who looks after family members, friends or neighbours because of their ageing, long-term illnesses or disabilities without getting paid? There are 13 million unpaid carers in the UK providing invaluable support for their loved-ones. It is estimated that 1 in 3 of us will be an unpaid carer at some point in our lives. Looking after a loved-one is invaluable, but it can also be hard. Mobilise supports your love-based choice of taking up such a precious role by providing “a little mind space” in caring life through integrated personalised services: peer, professional and family support; and a carer-centred onboarding mechanism.
Looking after oneself is always beneficial for the mental wellbeing, but our in-depth interviews revealed that it is challenging for people with caring roles to take time to do that. One carer described her life as if she was running on a hamster-wheel.Because of their love for their loved-ones, people with caring roles tend to devote themselves so much when looking after the cared-for person, and prioritise caring responsibilities over their own wellbeing, which not only harms their mental health, but also puts their loved-ones at risk.Mobilise makes caring activities easier by providing integrated services to find and manage information. It also provides the environment to easily and confidently receive help from other carers and family members. Not only can Mobilise squeeze their caring activities to create space, but also creates opportunities and environments to nudge carers to have their own space.
A huge challenge for supporting carers is that they don’t reach out for carer support until they recognise themselves as a carer. We found that most people don’t think of themselves as a carer, but as a partner, a parent, a child, a friend or a neighbour. It is said that it takes up to two years of their caring role before they even recognise their additional responsibilities. As a result, what typically happens is that when the carers reach out to carer support services, they are already arriving very close to the crisis point. Mobilise changes the situation itself where carers need to think of themselves as a carer to get support by integrating patient support services within the platform. Through using the services to support their loved-ones, carers can start using the carer support service without the self-recognition of being a carer, which helps them care for their loved ones better in the long run.
During the research, we figured out that there are gaps between the carer support sector and other healthcare and social care sectors. In a sense that the main focus of the carer support service providers is the carer, and that of the health and social care service providers is the cared-for. Carers behind the cared-for person often feel neglected by the healthcare sector, even though carers are the ones contacting them in most cases.By putting carers at the centre, we integrated services from these two sectors together on the same platform, so that carers do not have to navigate around an overwhelming, scattered load of information.
The platform is aimed at creating “a little mind space” for carers, but it does not stop there. The bigger objective for the project is to redesign the agency of people with caring responsibilities.We’ve heard many stories from carers that they want to pursue their individual goals, be it in their academic achievements, professional ambitions, or hobbies that they are good at, but had to put them on hold because of their additional caring responsibilities. “Carer” should not be a label, a name of a person, nor a category of the population. “Caring” is a role that everyone might take up in our lives, which has a significant impact on every other aspect of life. Through this platform, we would like to support their love-based choice of taking up such a precious role and assist them in pursuing their life goals.
Angélique, Anna, Annie, Brian, Caroline, Robert, James and all Mobilise members, Mollie and all Camden Carers members
