Abstract
Despite the Nordic welfare states’ ambitions of providing comprehensive services for covering the needs of their ageing populations, informal carers including family members, friends and neighbours, mostly women, are actively involved, and their lives are affected by the ways the formal system functions. The paper is based on interviews with adult informal carers providing care for older people receiving eldercare services in Denmark. It addresses the problem of the current political pressure on informal carers’ participation in formal eldercare while simultaneously providing no systematic strategies for recognising their role as informal carers. Thereby, potentially, an invisible care workforce is created, with very few formal rights. Using Honneth’s recognition theory and Winnicott’s concept of holding environment, the paper points at two ways the invisibility leads to violations of informal carers. The first takes place through a lack of recognition and holding of the challenging psycho-social emotions, we find among the informal carers for older people in close relationships, who encounter increasing thresholds for getting eldercare services provided by the municipality. The second violation concerns the non-involvement of informal carers’ knowledge about the older people they care for, despite policy strategies of providing person-centred eldercare, taking account of individual needs and circumstances, and despite ambitions of co-operation with informal carers. The paper contributes to the wider discussion of how eldercare services are developed in ways that increasingly, but unnoticeably, have disrupting consequences for the lives and work carriers of informal carers, and for their relationships to the older people they care for.
Presenters
Anne LivengAssociate Professor, Health and Society, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark Karen Christensen
Professor, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Zeeland, Denmark
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Social and Cultural Perspectives on Aging
KEYWORDS
INFORMAL CARE, ELDER CARE, INVISIBILITY, VIOLATION, RECOGNITION
