The role of kinship carers in Scotland is too rarely celebrated.

The reason for this isn't hard to divine. Grandparents, aunts and uncles and other relatives or family friends who take on the care of children who can't be looked after by their own parents are quietly heroic.

Often at great cost to themselves they become parents to young relations very often because their true mother or father, or both have a drink or drug addiction. In some cases parents are affected by mental health problems, which carries its own stigma. Most of us are accustomed to keeping such family tribulations behind closed doors.

Where the kinship carers are grandparents there are some who will judge them for their offspring going off the rails too. So it's no surprise that such arrangements aren't always widely advertised.

That's why it was great to see Edinburgh's Yvonne Ramsey recognised with a British Empire Medal in the new year's honours list.

Only the second person ever to be award the BEM for services to Kinship Care, Yvonne has been kinship carer for her granddaughter for 17 years as a result of her own daughter's substance misuse. But she has also been a driving force in organising kinship carers as a part of a growing movement to demand a better deal and profile for such care which it is claimed saves the Scottish Government up to £600m a year.

When Yvonne began looking after her granddaughter, she had to deal with the child's complex emotional and behavioural needs. Her own daughter's behaviour at the time was tempestuous. Completely isolated, she says she received no support or advice from social services.

So she formed a small peer support group, bringing others in her situation together for a coffee and a chat, to share problems and ideas. Yvonne became a one-woman research team, reading up on relevant law, research and council policy.

Numbers in her group grew and she formed the charity Kinsfolk Carers a decade ago, raising funds to help new kinship carers afford beds, clothes and other basics. Later outings and Christmas and Easter gifts for those unable to afford them were also funded. A helpline operates day and night and takes calls from across Scotland.

Now recognised by Edinburgh City Council, for whom she represents kinship carers on an advisory group, Yvonne now often receives calls for advice from the same social work department that was unable to help her when she started out.

Earlier in 2014 Yvonne started working for Mentor, a charity which works with the Scottish Government on kinship care, as well as running a family support programme which provides financial advice, family days out and one-to-one support for kinship carers in Edinburgh and the Lothians.

The difference approach from Government over the 17 years since Yvonne became a kinship carer is marked. Kinship carers get financial help, and policy announcements. A kinship care order, to help formalise the arrangements and give families more stability, is set to become law and will be debated by MSPs this month [Jan].

Campaigners in the Scottish Kinship Care Alliance still have concerns, especially relating to the level of financial allowances for kinship carers and what many see as ongoing discrimination which sees kinship carers less favourably treated than mainstream foster carers.

While some would argue that blood is thicker than water, and families should step in when relatives are in trouble, the responsibility taken on by kinship carers, of getting children up and to school, taking them to activities, paying for uniforms, managing homework and much more are tasks that many of us wouldn't readily choose - at a stage in life when child-rearing was thought to have been left behind.

It is down to the inspirational efforts of Yvonne and others of her ilk that so much progress ahas been made. However, her own assessment is modest : "Being a kinship carer is hard, but if I can help ease that difficulty in some way and let them know that there is support out there then I am happy."