| 193 7 they will support people living with, albeit with little support and recognition of this complex work. Likewise, there is a wide array of dementia symptoms they may encounter across individuals such as incontinence, forgetfulness, behavioural and communication problems. It has been recommended that social care workers should receive a minimum of eight hours of dementiaspecific training that is tailored towards their specific role and experience (60). Social care workers in our study identified other components besides training and education that they deemed important in providing good quality care to a person living with dementia. This corroborates findings that experience and interpersonal skills are valuable, and that dementia training and education may have limited effects on attitude, knowledge and confidence (50, 61). However, communication skills training can be particularly important, it has been shown to affect the quality of life of people living with dementia and improved communication fosters their sense of connectedness, and the quality of their relationships, and facilitates person-centred care (62, 63). Whilst our study focused on carer burden, we also identified social care worker burden. Although the mental health of social care workers has received increased attention during the Covid-19 outbreak (64), prior to that, workrelated stress has been associated with an increased risk of mental health problems (65, 66). The evidence on the effectiveness of interventions to reduce work-related stress (such as education, mindfulness, skills and communication training) for social care workers is inconsistent (67). Social care workers experiencing burden and poor mental health may feed into the quality of care they provide, thus negatively impacting informal caregivers and their burden. In our study, we identified that some of the issues causing stress lead back to broader issues in social care, specifically workforce capacity, lack of sufficient time for client visits and lack of support for employees. This might be especially problematic in dementia care as people living with dementia can present with complex challenges that may require specific skills and extensive time. This suggests that next to interventions to reduce social care workers stress, the system could also make changes that could potentially aid stress reduction. Strengths & limitations This paper is the first to explore the link between social care and carer burden in dementia. We were able to integrate the perspectives of both informal caregivers and social care workers to gain a rounder perspective and identify
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