Supporting Black and Minority Ethnic Older People's Mental Wellbeing: accounts of social care practice

This report (originally practice enquiry) aimed to look at practitioners' accounts of their practice in promoting the wellbeing of older people from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds in four parts of the United Kingdom (UK).Although there is no single universally agreed definition of wellbeing, it is usually seen as including important aspects of people's lives, such as life satisfaction, a sense of achievement and purpose, and generally feeling that life is worthwhile. Although an absence of wellbeing is associated with depression, wellbeing is about more than not feeling depressed. Governments and policy makers are becoming increasingly interested in measuring the success of the services they provide by looking at how they can improve wellbeing but we know very little about how adult social care services seek to improve the wellbeing of the communities they serve.Previous work by the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) (Sharif et al, 2008) has shown that little is known about the mental health of older people from BME groups and the role of social care practitioners in providing them with support. As the proportion of older people from minority groups living in the UK increases (Lievesley, 2010), we need to know more about how they experience mental wellbeing and common mental health problems in later life, excluding dementia, (See SCIE guide Assessing the mental health needs of older people.)