As part of Cares Week, Ruth Brown, Chief Operations Officer at home care franchise Home Instead UK, discusses the burden of family care on women.
Carers Week falls in June – it’s an annual campaign to raise awareness of the challenges faced by unpaid carers and the significant contribution they make to families and communities throughout the UK.
As a home care provider, we work alongside many family carers and we see the pressures they are under. We were interested to understand these people better and last year undertook a survey to explore this.
The findings surprised even us. 88% of family carers say they are neglecting their own health and wellbeing, 75% neglect their career and 86% feel guilty about not doing enough for their parents or children.
What it also revealed is that the burden of family care falls disproportionately on women who put in many more hours looking after elderly relatives than men do.
88% of females and 65% of men said there is greater expectation on women to meet caring responsibilities than men. Not surprisingly, 84% of females think we need to rethink the role of women as default carers in society – a view shared by 66% of males.
42% of male carers believe men are not doing enough to help with ageing parents and 62% of males believe women should demand the burden of care be shared more equally with men.
We launched a campaign, Take Care, as a result of the survey. We wanted to raise awareness of family carers and let them know that they are not alone and that help is out there.
One of the really interesting dynamics is that many family carers don’t see themselves as carers. And I speak from experience as I am one myself and see myself as a daughter, doing her bit to help her parents, rather than a carer.
This is picked up as part of the Carers Week campaign who specifically ask ‘Who is a carer?’. They spell it out ‘someone who provides unpaid care and support to a family member or friend’. This might seem obvious, but until you recognise and acknowledge that you are a carer, you won’t access the support that’s out there – because you think it’s for someone else.
Not surprisingly, Home Instead attracts many people who are family carers who join us as Care Professionals, bringing an invaluable amount of hands-on experience and an ability to connect with family members as well as their clients. After all, they are in the same situation and have a level of empathy that can’t be taught.
And it’s not just at an office level that we benefit from the lived experience of family carers. I’ve already mentioned that I’m one. At the time I joined Home Instead 14 years ago I was the primary carer for my grandma – now fast forward 14 years I am caring for my parents – primarily my Mum who is in the late stages of vascular dementia. I truly understand and know the pressures of having my own family, a career and looking after my parents.
My story, “my why” is not unique at Home Instead. It is the same story for many of our National Office team and our franchise owners too. The majority have experience of how difficult it is to juggle family and business life with care responsibilities. They have perhaps experienced poor care support and come to Home Instead because they want to make a difference.
So we have the facts; what do we do with them? We urgently need to rethink this default female carer role and I think our ageing parents would benefit from this as well as our siblings.
As a society we need a conversation about what needs to change to make this happen. Thank you to Care Talk for helping us to raise awareness of this issue.
@Homeinsteaduk
homeinstead.co.uk
