Information for carers and the people they support - Understanding your role in screening
Carers and care providers play an essential role in making sure that the people they care for feel supported to access screening when invited.
The information on this page will help you if you are:
- someone who has been invited for screening and needs support
- an unpaid carer
- a care worker, or
- a health professional.
If you are an unpaid carer who provides support to someone, it is equally important that you look after your own health.
We understand that you may not see yourself as a carer.
The Carers Wales ‘State of Caring Survey, 2022’ showed that half of all carers took over a year to recognise their caring role, with over a third taking more than three years to recognise themselves as a carer.
If you are a friend or family member who provides support to someone, you may find the information on this page helpful.
The Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act (2014) defines an unpaid carer as:
‘Someone who provides unpaid care to an adult or disabled child. The cared for person may be a family member or a friend, who due to illness, disability, a mental health problem or an addiction cannot cope without their support. A carer could be a husband caring for his wife, a parent caring for their child who has care and support needs or a child caring for their parent.’
Taking part in screening
To make a decision about taking part in screening, a person must have:
- access to clear and accurate information, in a format that suits their needs
- support (if they need it) to understand the information
- time to consider the information, and
- further support (if they need it) to help them make a decision.
Transcript
So, taking part in screening is something really important that you can do to help look after your own health. And we know that screening looks for early signs of certain conditions where they might be too small to see or feel, or you might not notice that there’s anything different.
But what we know, is that if we find these conditions early, then you have the best chance of successful treatment.
So, carers and care providers, including unpaid carers who might look after family members or friends, play a really essential role in supporting the people they care for, to access screening.
And if you are a carer, it’s really important that you look after your own health too, taking part in screening is a choice and we would encourage everybody who gets invited to a screening to use the information that we provide to help them make an informed decision about that.
This carers resource on the website provides specific information if you are someone who requires support to access screening, if you’re a health care worker or a care support worker, or if you are on unpaid carer, looking after friend or family member.
So, what we would encourage you to do is go through all the information on this website and in particular, contact the programme using the contact details on the invitation letter so that we can make sure that we provide the care in the right way for you and can answer any questions.
Page last reviewed: 26th February 2025