Textbooks, monographs and policy-focused books on our Health and Social Care list push forward the boundaries of teaching, theory, policy and practice. The list covers areas including global health, health inequalities and research into policy and practice.
Key series include Transforming Care which provides a crucial platform for scholars researching early childhood care, care for adults with disabilities and long-term care for frail older people, and the Sociology of Health Professions, offering high-quality, original work in the sociology of health professions with an innovative focus on their likely future direction. Our leading journal in the area is the International Journal of Care and Caring.
Health and Social Care
The COVID-19 pandemic has made many aspects of care work more visible. This article focuses on cleaning as a form of care work that has been systematically ignored and made invisible. We examine both the benefits and drawbacks of acknowledging cleaning as a specific form of care: while broadening the concept of care might risk diluting its analytical precision, incorporating cleaning into care work discussions brings attention to its significance. We argue that recognizing cleaning as care is vital because it uncovers its nurturing, life-sustaining and intimate qualities. Cleaning can, thus, be understood as a biopolitical dimension of contemporary societies.
Dementia affects over 55 million people worldwide, with much support provided by unpaid carers, who struggle to access leisure-time physical activities. This review investigates gender differences in engagement in group-based physical activity for people with dementia and their unpaid carers. A systematic review from inception until 1 August 2024 resulted in the inclusion of 15 studies. The review found that slightly more males than females with dementia attended the group physical activity sessions, with most carers attending being female. Further research is required to inform interventions to promote physical activity in male and female unpaid carers for people living with dementia.
In this article, we examine unpaid care work through the lens of subaltern women in Ecuador, highlighting their oppression and resistance. Based on decolonial feminist epistemology, we propose a new framework for analysing well-being in care work, inspired by Indigenous cosmologies. The study presents an analytical framework for Buen Vivir centred on care time and applies it to the Ecuadorian Amazon community of Tzawata. Using such methods as time diaries, interviews and a focus group, it explores when care time devoted to family, self-care, community and territory-nature is perceived as emancipatory and/or alienating. The findings reveal both the emancipatory and alienating dimensions of care and demonstrate the interconnectedness of these four times.
The poor working conditions of care workers within Germany’s eldercare sector have resulted in a series of reforms. Employing a conceptual framework that combines feminist perspectives on the devaluation of care work, Fraser’s concept of recognition and redistribution, and Honneth’s concept of distribution struggles, this article assesses whether these reforms have increased the social status of this undervalued sector. The findings indicate that these reforms have both positively and negatively impacted the social status of eldercare work – a phenomenon that this article links to the contradictory influence of the state, trade unions and provider associations during distribution struggles.
This study aims to understand how care planning is conducted in English older adult care homes and explore the views of staff involved in care planning. Drawing on 22 semi-structured interviews, the findings of the study are organised around five themes: the aims of care planning; conducting care planning; support and resources for care planning; the use of care planning information; and improving care planning. Our discussion notes the ways in which care staff would like to improve how care planning is conducted but highlights that a lack of resources may make improvement difficult.
Support from family or friends is fundamental to people dying at home. Understanding what impacts unpaid carer resilience is essential if services are to support them effectively. Seven databases were searched using a scoping review methodology. Delimiters included date, geographical area and language. A total of 647 articles were identified, with 11 articles meeting the inclusion criteria. Most studies focused on coping strategies (n = 9), not resilience. Nearly all identified studies involved bereaved carers (n = 9), with no studies focusing purely on current unpaid carer experience. Further research is needed to explore what current unpaid carers identify as impacting their resilience.
Young carers represent a poorly understood subset of Australian youth. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 13 young Australian adults who undertook an informal caring role prior to the age of 20. Findings indicate that providing care to a loved one as a child or adolescent is a difficult task that appears highly transformative, with effects that continue into young adulthood. Several common factors were identified, including difficulties engaging with school, feeling under-supported and often experiencing social isolation. Most participants reported a significant impact on their mental health. Counterintuitively, many respondents reported pride and gratefulness for the experience.
Support can moderate the impacts of caring for family members during childhood, but while specialist projects have been found to be beneficial for those with substantial responsibilities, there is limited evidence on how mainstream services can identify and support the larger population. This phenomenological study of the wider spectrum investigated experiences of accessing support over a year-long period. The findings highlight the diversity of the spectrum in terms of family support, care-receiver relationships and motivations for privacy or disclosure. Participants also contrasted the individualised support offered by projects with the lack of engagement and identification by mainstream services.
Population ageing is one of the most impactful phenomena in contemporary Western societies. COVID-19 put great pressure on worldwide public health and long-term care (LTC) systems, demanding substantial investments in search of new sustainability. This study analyses the opinions of European experts on the positive and negative aspects of the impact of COVID-19 on their national LTC systems to identify valuable lessons and innovative policies for European LTC strategy after this recent health emergency. A content analysis was performed on interviews with and focus groups of experts and stakeholders from selected countries. The findings argue for an innovative, open and comprehensive LTC model.
