Ageing and Gerontology > Ageing, Health and Care
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Giving care workers opportunities to voice their concerns can have a significant impact on their work engagement. The aim of this article is to explore how care home supervisors discursively position themselves in relation to care workers when responding to their work-related concerns. The data consist of 19 official workplace meetings in four care homes. The analysis draws from discourse analysis and positioning theory. The care home supervisors used two interpretative repertoires that constructed two subject positions for them: the task-oriented leadership repertoire presented the supervisor as a director; and the relationship-oriented leadership repertoire presented the supervisor as a coach.
The decline of masculinised industries across the Global North is well documented; however, to date, there has been relatively little discussion of feminised paid care work in formerly industrial areas. Drawing on evidence of gendered and classed ‘care trajectories’ into paid adult social care and childcare care work in one such area, Teesside, North-East England, our findings show continuities with research documenting entrenched problems with low-paid, insecure work. We argue that greater recognition, increased valorisation and markedly improved care work employment conditions would bring wide-reaching benefits to places where they now comprise a large share of local employment.
This article presents results from a systematic literature review within the broader research framework of the ‘Combining Employment and Informal Care’ project. It integrates three key perspectives: a methodological emphasis on qualitative studies; a geographical-cultural focus on German-speaking countries; and an exploration of the health effects of combining employment and care. Eight relevant studies were identified. Key issues are: understanding the familial carers’ perceptions of their situation; assessing the impact of combining care and employment on physical, mental and social health; and identifying facilitating or challenging factors in their daily lives. Factors like workplace arrangements and social support networks are found to influence carers’ health outcomes the most. Recognizing the pivotal role of health outcomes, this study underscores the importance of future qualitative research to further comprehend the intricacies of combining employment and care.
Although evidence shows that personalisation improves access to health and social care for UK’s racially minoritised groups, research suggests that uptake is low due to racism, discrimination and negative experiences with mainstream services. A systematic literature review of 45 articles found that racially minoritised individuals choose personalisation for greater control and choice over their care but face systemic barriers, including a complicated adult social care system that fails to respond to cultural and linguistic values. Recommendations to improve uptake include involving racially minoritised communities in service planning, attracting a diverse workforce, tackling racism and discrimination, bridging the information gap, and funding racially minoritised community organisations.
Do countries with greater women’s political representation offer better policy protections for male workers with family caregiving responsibilities via stronger paternity leave policies? Using data from the Global Care Policy Index project on a diverse set of 30 countries’ paternity leave policies, we find that the share of women’s representation in their country’s national parliament is strongly and positively correlated with more robust and longer paternity leave coverage. Qualitative evidence from five case studies – Sweden, Iceland, the UK, Sri Lanka and Nigeria – with varying paternity leave policies demonstrates how this relationship works on the ground.
In this article, we argue that structural stigma is a fundamental and often overlooked factor contributing to carer inequalities globally and that interventions that solely target individual carer outcomes are therefore unlikely to be effective or sustainable without a systemic approach that considers the multilevel social issues that are the root causes of carer disparities. Recognising, redistributing and alleviating unpaid care are not only moral imperatives but also economic necessities. It is urgent to understand further how structural stigma related to dementia is conceptualised and operationalised, what its implications are for unpaid care, and strategies to end it globally.
Providing care for longer hours is associated with detrimental effects on carers’ employment and earnings. However, very little is known about carer financial hardship, especially from an intersectional perspective. This study makes use of the UK Household Longitudinal Study to investigate associations between providing care and poverty. Findings show that unpaid carers are more likely to face poverty than non-carers and that this gap has become wider over time. Employment and older age seem to be protective characteristics associated with a lower likelihood of poverty. These findings support the recognition of the many challenges faced by unpaid carers.
This scoping review highlights the need for research to address the intersectional relationship between racialisation, health inequality and frailty in older age. We map research addressing the relationship between frailty and ethnicity across literature exploring health inequality in order to collate findings, identify trends and highlight research gaps. Our most significant finding is the absence of attention to the role of racism despite the majority of studies identifying a positive correlation between frailty and minority ethnicity. In countries with ageing populations, ill health and frailty was generally found to strike earlier and more severely in racially minoritised groups. However, there is a paucity of research addressing ageing and ethnicity. To focus the review, we asked: how are frailty and ethnicity/race related in the current literature addressing health inequality? We map the existing literature, commenting on terminology, findings and methodology. While social, economic and cultural factors are speculated to be explanations for inequality, there has been little analysis of the association between frailty, ethnicity and socioeconomic inequality, no explicit attention to the role of racism and little qualitative research to explore the lived experience of frailty and ethnicity. Despite the contested nature of both frailty and ethnicity, the majority of studies lacked definitions of the terms used, particularly with respect to ‘identifying terms’ used for ethnicity. We call for further research (particularly qualitative research) to address frailty and ethnicity in the context of racialisation and health inequality and for critical engagement with ‘identifying terms’ used.
