Linda Miller and Alison Soliman introduce the final article of a series coordinated by the RCN Steering Committee for Mental Health and Older People exploring aspects of mental health assessment. This article focuses specifically on the assessment of family carers and how nurses can help them care with confidence, enabling older people to remain at home

Successful implementation of community care has been a major policy issue for the last 30 years and is a primary objective for policy makers and health and social service care agencies (1). During this time many people have argued that before the 1988 Griffiths Report (2), the concept of ‘community care’ was ambiguous, with competing models in existence. Implemented in April 1993, the community care component of the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act (3) placed an increasing emphasis on collaborative working and the coordination of services (4). In deed, effective in ter-agency working may well prove to be the standard by which community care initiatives are judged. The aims of these initiatives are two fold: to avoid unnecessary fragmentation of service provision; and to provide a co-ordinated and effective service which is needs led rather than service led.’(Section 4.4)