| 189 7 or there were language barriers. In addition, social care workers often had to cover home visits for colleagues, and this lack of continuity negatively affected their opportunities for building relationships. But those four carers who came in would be changing, on a week-by-week basis different people used to come in, and that’s where the there is a real problem of relationships and you know, connection and so on. (informal caregiver 15) Lack of specialized dementia training & knowledge Informal caregivers had an implicit assumption that social care workers had sufficient dementia training and knowledge. However, in practice, they sometimes perceived social care workers to lack good quality training and education and felt it negatively impacted the quality of care provided to their loved ones. Especially in rare dementia diagnoses, it was assumed that the social care workers were not equipped to provide the best quality care. Secondly, you need to have done some dementia-specific training before you come here because people with dementia will react differently to other people. (informal caregiver 14) Interestingly, social care workers reported mixed experiences whereby some social care workers reported positive experiences with training and education whilst others felt they were offered limited provision or access to dementia training. Some social care workers emphasized that valuable dementia knowledge was learned on the job rather than in training. Training wasn’t mandatory, but it was encouraged. We have actually recently trained, they changed it. So I think they are doing it not as like false mandatory anymore, but definitely more encouraged like less optional than it was when I started four years ago. (care worker 3) 4. Burden migration to social care workers Social care workers attributed the stress they felt to their job. In particular, they were challenged to balance their high workload with the time pressures they were under.
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