Wishaw woman has been recognised for her decades of campaigning for local carers in the New Year’s Honours List.
Elizabeth Seaton was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to the Carers Network in Scotland.
Mrs Seaton, 79, has been the chair of North Lanarkshire Carers Together (NLCT) for over 15 years and was notified in mid-November she would be receiving the gong.
She said: “I am overwhelmed and humbled to have received such an award.
“I got a letter through the post on November 14 and was told it had to be kept confidential.
“I was bursting to tell someone but I couldn’t even tell my own family which was hard particularly over Christmas.
“When the news was confirmed I was so pleased to be able to tell my son Stewart in Australia and my daughter Lorna who lives near Dundee.”
Mrs Seaton started as a carer at 14, looking after her mum.
Later in life she became a full-time carer again when her late husband James was paralysed after a road traffic accident.
She found positives in her experience, setting up NLCT where she has been the director and chairwoman for more than a decade and a half.
Mrs Seaton represents carers on over 15 strategic groups within North Lanarkshire and continually reinforces the contribution that carers make within families, local communities and society as a whole.
She regularly lobbies politicians as part of her campaign for more national recognition of rights for carers and much of this campaigning has now came to fruition in the form of the Carers (Scotland) Act 2016, which came into force in 2018.
She added: “There are approximately 46,000 carers in North Lanarkshire so what we are working with is just the tip of the iceberg.
“We are making sure carers are considered in the local implementation of new legislation, such as Reshaping Care for Older People and more recently with the Integration of Health and Social Care.
“But we have been able to campaign on other issues as well.
“We lobbied the Scottish Parliament to make sure carers were eligible to receive their flu jab each year.
“We argued that if the unpaid carer was unwell then there would be no-one there to look after the person needing care. I was delighted when we managed to achieve that.”
