Carers Connection - October 2025

See our October bulletin for updates on:

• Your new Carer Representative
• Flu & Covid vaccines
• Pension Age Winter Heating Payment
• Stirling Sunshine Singers
• DyslexiFest 2025
• BBC Debate Night
• What’s On – October

…and more

Carers Connection - September 2025

See our September bulletin for updates on:

• SafeConnect Dementia Tags
• Carer Wellbeing Tollkit
• PLUS Transition Information Evening
• Mobilise Carer Support App
• Carers’ Garden Update
• Carers Parliament 2025
• What’s On – September

…and more

Carers Connection - July 2025

See our July bulletin for updates on:

• Respitality
• Annual State of Caring survey
• Time to Live grants
• Young Carers Festival
• Carers Parliament 2025
• What’s On – August

…and more

Cara is a parent Carer for her six year old son who has a rare genetic condition.

Cara’s Story

Who do you care for?
“I care for my 6 year old son, Mylo, who has a rare genetic disorder. Mylo requires attention during the day and night. He has low muscle tone, is hypermobile and is cognitively disabled.”

How does your caring role make you feel?
“At first I really struggled with my caring role in terms of how life-changing it can be and has been. It took a few years to accept how life was going to be and to get used to the change in space, the learning that was required, and to make a new journey in life.

Mylo has taught me a lot, as I spent so long being upset about things he couldn’t do instead of what he could. He taught me how to be more patient and what resilience truly is.”

How does your life run alongside caring?
“I have managed to continue to work full time alongside my caring role but, it doesn’t come easy. It can be a lot of pressure and stress to keep all the plates spinning.

Mylo is very rarely away from me, so I don’t have a great social life or time to spend with my daughter, but we manage with what time we have.”

“It can be a lot of pressure and stress to keep all the plates spinning.”

How have you overcome challenges faced during your caring role?
“I have learned through dealing with things to help Mylo that nothing is easy to deal with, but if you keep going, you will get there eventually.”

What advice would you give to other Carers?
“Do what you know is best for the person you are caring for. You know them best, and they need you to be the best advocate you can be for them, as they need their voices heard. Sometimes it’s not easy, and we wish we didn’t need to fight for half of what they deserve, but keep going!”

“Nothing is easy to deal with, but if you keep going, you will get there eventually.”

Carers Week 2025

Carers Week is all about celebrating the amazing work unpaid Carers do every day for their families, friends and communities. It’s a chance to say thank you, raise awareness of the challenges Carers face, and shine a light on the support that’s out there.

This year’s theme, Caring About Equality, highlights the need for fairer opportunities for unpaid Carers. Each day of Carers Week will have a specific focus and highlight the different ways inequality impacts Carers’ lives:

• Monday: Health and social care
• Tuesday: Financial wellbeing 
• Wednesday: Work and employment
• Thursday: Younger carers
• Friday: Older carers
• Saturday: Mental health and wellbeing
• Sunday: Reflections on Carers Week

We’ll be celebrating at Stirling Carers Centre with a range of events including workshops, activities, awareness-raising sessions, and more. We’d love to welcome you along to these. Visit our Carers Week page for more event details.

UK Benefit Reform: What It Means for Scotland

The UK Government announced in March that it is planning major changes to disability benefits, especially Personal Independence Payment (PIP), starting from 2026. These changes include making it harder to qualify for PIP, increasing face-to-face assessments, and using PIP as the gateway to health-related top-ups in Universal Credit. There has been a lot of talk around how this will affect Scotland, so we’ve summarised the key things you should know.

Key Information:

• In Scotland, PIP has been replaced by Adult Disability Payment (ADP), which is run by the Scottish Government.
• The Scottish Government has confirmed it will not make the same changes, and ADP will continue to be more inclusive and easier to access.
• Scotland gets funding from the UK Government based on how much is spent on PIP in England and Wales. If UK spending goes down, Scotland’s share drops too. The Scottish Government could have a shortfall of up to £850 million by 2029.
• Due to the number of Carers expected to lose entitlement to Carers Allowance in England and Wales, the Scottish Government may also need to cover funding shortfalls to maintain Carer Support Payment levels.
• We don’t yet know how Adult Disability Payment claimants in Scotland will access the health element of Universal Credit in 2028.

We’ll keep an eye on developments and update you with any decisions that are made, particularly around the implications for unpaid Carers. You can read the Scottish Government’s briefing paper on the proposed reforms below.

Photo by William Warby: https://www.pexels.com/photo/coins-in-white-background-19679312/

On behalf of Stirling Carers Centre, it is my great pleasure to present the Annual Report for 2023/24.

The Centre has, once again, seen some very strong service delivery to unpaid Carers in the region, with almost 500 new Carers registered and over 600 Carer Support Plans and Young Carers Statements completed. This has provided essential support against the backdrop of financial pressures adding to the concerns of unpaid Carers over the past year, and I’d like to very much thank everyone who has contributed to that:

• Our staff, who are endlessly cheerful, extremely passionate, and impressively dedicated;
• Our statutory and independent funders, whose support is never taken for granted and critical to the ongoing benefits that the staff bring to the unpaid Carer community;
• And the volunteers that work with us, whom I cannot thank enough.

In the year ahead we are going to experience a deal of change.

Colleen McGregor has recently resigned and left us just this month. I’m extremely grateful to Colleen for all the great work that she did over her (too short) time in the post of CEO; she has left the Centre in a much better place than when she took up that post. As sad as I am to see her leave us, she has a great new role and we all wish her all the very best in it.

We have appointed Keri Moore as interim CEO and are conducting a thorough search open to both internal and external candidates, which we hope to conclude in September or early October at the latest. Our priority, however, is the right candidate, and the Board will take the time needed to ensure that.

In addition, Aaron Hunter has resigned from the Board. Again, I’d like to thank Aaron, he was great to have on the Board, and, sad though we are, Aaron also has a fantastic new professional opportunity and we wish him well.

Finally, the UK has changed. There will inevitably be changes in approach to care with the change in government. There are fiscal challenges within local government, a key funding and service partner for us, and there are technological changes that present both challenges and opportunities.

Given how we have performed over the past three or four years, themselves with no small level of upheaval, I have absolute confidence in our staff and partners, and in the service in the year ahead.

Thank you all once again.

David Khan
Chair of the Board

The service contract funding we receive from our statutory partners, Clackmannanshire and Stirling Health & Social Care Partnership and Stirling Council, allows us to provide many of our core services to Unpaid Carers, and for this we are most fortunate.

However, our additional services are funded by a range of trusts and individual donors, without whose support our service would be greatly restricted. We would like to extend our thanks for their on-going support.