Suchergebnisse

Becoming a caregiver is increasingly an inevitable experience for many people and, therefore, a likely life transition. Drawing on research and personal experiences of working with family caregivers, this book examines a range of family caregiving situations from across the life course. It seeks to capture the dynamics of caregiving in a number of common situations: caregiving during infancy, for adults who acquire a disability through accidents or illness, for older people with age-related issues, and caregiving by children and adolescent carers and grandparent carers. In drawing attention to key moments of vulnerability faced by family and informal caregivers, and by suggesting how to assist 'reconnection' at these moments, the book provides a guide for those working in the area of health, disability and care. Informal care is conceptualised as occurring with the context of personal interrelationships, these being nested within wider kin networks and linked with wider professional formal care networks. Informal care is seen both as an expression of social capital and as an activity that builds social capital. It is an indicator of resources of mutual support within social networks, and it has the effect of adding to the stock of social resources. The book makes a case, therefore, for facilitating the development of social capital by strengthening the capacity of informal caregivers and caregiver groups, and by improving the linkages with formal care organisations

AbstractWe use matched employer–employee data to explore the relationship between employees' access to flexible working arrangements and the amount of informal care they provide to sick or elderly friends and relatives. Flexitime and the ability to reduce working hours are each associated with about 13% more hours of informal care. Workplaces do not respond to the presence of carers by providing flexible work, instead there is some underlying selection of carers into flexible workplaces. The wider workplace environment beyond formal flexible work may also facilitate care.

AbstractInformal care occupies a paradoxical place in contemporary societies. It is at once reified as an inherent social good, and minimised, devalued, and pushed to the margins. The current 'care crisis' is bringing these tensions into sharp relief, fuelling renewed interest in care and its absences across a wide range of disciplines. In this article, we present an overview of five key literatures for comprehending informal care, with a focus on issues of inequality and injustice. These bodies of scholarship—which, respectively, emphasise the political-economic, affective, policy, geographic, and ecological dimensions of informal care—together furnish a critical conceptualisation of informal care that both recognises care's social value, and underlines its embeddedness in systems and structures of oppression. Informal care, we show, evades easy definition, requiring a sophisticated array of critical concepts to capture its everyday complexities, avoid reductionism, and ultimately enable individual and collective flourishing.

Points out shortcomings of the formal system of care for blind and visually impaired elderly persons and examines the philosophical biases that lead to inadequate provision of services. Under the formal system such elderly persons are often isolated, deprived of dignity and individuality, and encouraged to adopt an attitude of dependency. Informal grassroots groups—family and friends of elderly persons, other nonprofessionals willing to help, and aged people themselves—can provide or help procure services that the formal system fails to offer or denies to needy persons. Specific guidelines are offered to influence federal and state agencies, private institutions, local agencies, and the home environment. The author suggests that the formal and informal systems can work together to enhance perceptions of the worth of blind and visually impaired elderly people and to improve the services they receive.

Growing numbers of elderly people, combined with falling birthrates, have generated increas ing interest within most western European and Scandinavian countries in measures which might increase the supply of care-giving labour while at the same time reducing the unit costs of that labour. To what extent, and how, might expensive formal service provision be replaced by less costly and more plentiful help from informal sources; and what is the role of the welfare state in protecting and regulating the different interests of those who give and those who receive care on an informal basis?