Series: Sociology of Health Professions
Series Editors: Mike Saks, University of Suffolk, UK and Mike Dent, Staffordshire University, UK
This series centres on the production of high quality, original work in the sociology of health professions with an innovative focus on the likely future direction of such professions.
Books in the series cover a wide range of associated health professional areas, and encompass interrelated health fields such as social care, as well as medicine, nursing and the allied health professions.
Sociology of Health Professions
Much of the international literature on health human resources focuses on highly trained, regulated and visible professionals with exclusionary social closure in neo-Weberian terms, such as doctors and nurses. However, researchers and policy makers are now paying more attention to the increasingly important role played by less well-trained, often unregulated, and less visible occupations such as personal support workers. Beyond these categories of paid workers exists another mostly uncharted health human resource: unpaid, little trained, largely unregulated and invisible informal carers. They include the family, friends and neighbours who provide the bulk of everyday care required to support the well being and independence of growing numbers of people facing multiple chronic health and social needs in community settings. Focusing on Canada, this chapter documents the characteristics and contributions of informal carers, and highlights the challenging realities of informal caregiving – both from the perspective of carers and policy makers considering how best to support and encourage unpaid, informal carers without driving up formal health system costs.
