Life as a young carer

Ray Thomas chuckles as he recalls the sight of bread appearing to butter itself on the kitchen counter back when his daughter was at preschool. "Sarah couldn't reach the counter to make sandwiches, so all you'd see is the bread and knife looking as though they were doing it themselves," he says.

Sarah has been a carer for her mother, Carole, who has multiple sclerosis, since she was small. Then, when she became an adolescent and her father was diagnosed with degenerative bone disease and fibromyalgia, she had to become his carer too. "I've never known anything else," says Sarah, who is now 18 and who continues to do everything from general household chores to helping with medication, providing physical assistance, filling in forms and many other day-to-day jobs.

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