Family caregivers are vital to enabling people with dementia to live longer in their own homes. For these caregivers, chatting with clinicians-being listened to empathetically and receiving reassurance-can be seen as not incidental but important to supporting them. This paper considers and identifies the significance of this relational work for family carers by re-examining data originally collected to document caregivers' perspectives on quality in crisis response teams. This reveals that chatting, for family caregivers, comprises three related features: (i) that family caregivers by responding to a person's changing and sometimes challenging needs and behaviors inhabit a precarious equilibrium; (ii) that caregivers greatly appreciate 'chatting' with visiting clinicians; and (iii) that while caregivers appreciate these chats, they can be highly critical of the institutionalized character of a crisis response team's involvement with them.
Keywords: carer experiences; community care; dementia; family carers; qualitative interviews.