* What are the key features of partnerships between family and professional carers?
* How do partnerships change over time?
* What is needed to help create the best working partnerships?

Forging partnerships between service users, family carers and service providers is a key theme in both the policy and academic literatures. However, what such partnerships mean and how they can be created and sustained while responding to change over time, is far from clear.

This book considers how family and professional carers can work together more effectively in order to provide the highest quality of care to people who need support in order to remain in their own homes. It adopts a temporal perspective looking at key transitions in caregiving and suggests the most appropriate types of help at particular points in time. It draws on both empirical and theoretical sources emerging from several countries and relating to a number of differing caregiving contexts in order to illustrate the essential elements of 'relationship-centred' care.

Partnerships in Family Care will be important reading for all health care students and professionals with an interest in community and home care for the ill, disabled, and elderly.