This thoughtful book provides a refreshing, comparative perspective on the future of care homes in our post-pandemic world. Building on more than a decade of collaborative international and ...interdisciplinary research in Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US, it employs a feminist political economy framework to address the key challenges facing care homes in this turbulent era.With particular attention to lessons learned in Canada, Sweden, and Norway, the contributing authors argue that publicly-funded care homes remain critical to care arrangements but require policy and practice transformations to produce equitable and supportive conditions. Attentive to the specific contexts and tensions that shape care, chapters address key questions about care home quality and labour in relation to gender, race, ethnicity, religion and class. The book analyses the physical and social boundaries that set the conditions for quality of life and care, moving beyond the minimum to explain how nursing homes can provide joy.Offering alternative approaches to the complex challenges facing this vital public service, this book will be a key reference for students and scholars of health policy, comparative social policy and social work. Its integration of statistical, policy and practice analysis with ethnographic research will prove invaluable to those concerned with long-term care policy and practice.
Critical to care Armstrong, Pat; Armstrong, Hugh; Scott-Dixon, Krista
Critical to care,
c2008, 20080628, 2008, 2008-01-01, 2008-06-14, 20080101
eBook
Who counts as a health care worker? The question of where we draw the line between health care workers and non-health care workers is not merely a matter of academic nicety or a debate without ...consequences for care. It is a central issue for policy development because the definition often results in a division among workers in ways that undermine care.
Critical to Careuses a wide range of evidence to reveal the contributions that those who provide personal care, who cook, clean, keep records, and do laundry make to health services. As a result of current reforms, these workers are increasingly treated as peripheral even though the research on what determines health demonstrates that their work is essential. The authors stress the invisibility and undervaluing of 'women's work' as well as the importance of context in understanding how this work is defined and treated.
Through a gendered analysis,Critical to Careestablishes a basis for discussing research, policy, and other actions in relation to the work of thousands of marginalized women and men every day.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The COVID-19 pandemic has made unpaid care more visible through its absence, while also increasing the need for it. Drawing on a range ...of research projects covering Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US, this book documents a broad spectrum of unpaid work performed by residents, relatives, volunteers and staff in nursing homes. It demonstrates how boundaries between paid and unpaid work are flexible, varying considerably with conditions, time, place and intersectional populations. By examining the complex labour process within nursing homes, this book provides insight and understanding which will be critical in planning for nursing home care post-pandemic.
The Royal Society of Canada Task Force on COVID-19 was formed in April 2020 to provide evidence-informed perspectives on major societal challenges in response to and recovery from COVID-19. The Task ...Force established a series of working groups to rapidly develop policy briefings, with the objective of supporting policy makers with evidence to inform their decisions. This paper reports the findings of the COVID-19 Long-Term Care (LTC) working group addressing a preferred future for LTC in Canada, with a specific focus on COVID-19 and the LTC workforce. First, the report addresses the research context and policy environment in Canada’s LTC sector before COVID-19 and then summarizes the existing knowledge base for integrated solutions to challenges that exist in the LTC sector. Second, the report outlines vulnerabilities exposed because of COVID-19, including deficiencies in the LTC sector that contributed to the magnitude of the COVID-19 crisis. This section focuses especially on the characteristics of older adults living in nursing homes, their caregivers, and the physical environment of nursing homes as important contributors to the COVID-19 crisis. Finally, the report articulates principles for action and nine recommendations for action to help solve the workforce crisis in nursing homes.
This thoughtful book provides a refreshing, comparative perspective on the future of care homes in our post-pandemic world. Building on more than a decade of collaborative international and ...interdisciplinary research in Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US, it employs a feminist political economy framework to address the key challenges facing care homes in this turbulent era.
Seeking to support qualitative researchers in the artful development of feminist care scholarship, our goal here is to ‘look back’ on how we have conceptualized the problems of care and developed ...research that illuminates the social organization of care in distinct ways. As part of a ‘feminist care scholar retrospective’, we present five condensed ‘reverse research proposals’, which are retrospective accounts of past research or scholarly activity. From there, we discuss how each project begins with a particular problematic for investigation and a particular conception of care (e.g., as practices, as work, as a concept) to illuminate facets of the social organization of care shaping paid and unpaid care work and its interpretations. These approaches reveal multiple and overlapping ways that care is embodied, understood and organized, as well as ways care can be transformed.
Take care Armstrong, Pat; Armstrong, Hugh; Choiniere, Jacqueline ...
Take care,
c1994, 19940101, 1994, 2000, 1994-01-01
eBook
Take Care: Warning Signals for Canada's Health Systemexamines the modern Canadian health care system and exposes the impact of neo-conservative and market-oriented policies, showing the effect these ...have on patients and caregivers, particulary women. The voices of hospital workers, relating their own daily experiences in the wards, add a poignant urgency to the crucial question: What kind of health care system will Canadians inherit in the twenty-first century?
This article explores the operation of gender and industrial relations in long‐term care work or nursing home work, ‘from within’ the experience of the predominantly female workforce in seven ...unionized facilities in Canada. Drawing on qualitative case study data in non‐profit facilities, the article argues that the main industrial relations challenges facing long‐term care workers are that their workplace priorities do not fit within existing, gendered, industrial relations processes and institutions. This article starts from the experience of women and threads this experience through other layers of social organization such as: global and local policy directions including austerity, New Public Management, and social and healthcare funding; industrial relations mechanisms and policy; and workers’ formal union and informal efforts to represent their interests in the workplace. The strongest themes in the reported experience of the women include: manufacturing conditions for unpaid work; increasing management and state dependence on unpaid care work; fostering loose boundaries; and limiting respect and autonomy as aspects of care work. The article extends the feminist political economy by analysing the links between the policies noted above and frontline care work. Building on gendered organizational theory the article also introduces the concept of non‐job work and suggests a fourth industrial relations institution, namely the needs and gendered expectations of residents, families and workers themselves, operating within the liminal spaces in care work.
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