iSupport for Dementia Carers Study

Our research will investigate the potential benefits of ‘iSupport’, an online learning and support programme for dementia carers.

The iSupport for Dementia Carers study will investigate whether using an online education and self-care website called ‘iSupport’ is better at helping you take care of yourself and learning about dementia compared to a booklet designed for dementia carers.

We have been supported by 352 unpaid carers living in England, Wales, or Scotland. We expect to complete all interviews by October 2023, and will begin analysing the data at the end of the year.

Find out more about the iSupport study

We have also culturally adapted iSupport to make it relevant for young people to learn about dementia and how they can help support someone living with dementia. This is important as young carers rarely receive appropriate training or support to help them. iSupport has also been adapted to make it more relevant to carers of people living with rarer types of dementia, such as young onset dementia, which can have other considerations for carers that were not detailed in the original programme.

We will update this website with free versions of the iSupport programmes in the coming months, as well as publications and summaries to help understand our work.

Our collaborators are also working on related projects: Colleagues at UCL have culturally adapted iSupport into 3 South Asian languages and are feasibility testing a Bengali version of iSupport. This is a response to the critical need to engage with minority ethnic communities to develop culturally sensitive interventions and make existing resources accessible. At University of Strathclyde, a physical activity mobile app is being tested to see whether it could be used to help unpaid carers exercise. This is an underdeveloped area of current science, despite unpaid carers often having poorer physical and mental health than people who are not carers.