Family Matters: The Work and Skills of Family/Friend Carers in Long-Term Residential Care

Abstract

The unpaid care work undertaken by family members and friends often continues when relatives move to long-term residential care (LTRC). Using a feminist political economy approach, this paper explores the labour and skills of family/friend carers—most of whom are women—in LTRC. Data were gathered using the rapid site-switching ethnography method, which involved document analysis, qualitative interviews with 25 family members, and observations in eight LTRC facilities across Canada. We present five themes, developed through a thematic analysis of interviews and observations, to give insight into the labour and skills of these unpaid carers in LTRC: maintaining relationships, navigating the system to assert residents’ needs, supplementing care, assisting other residents, and working for change. In our analysis, we tease out complexities between family/friend care work in practice and the descriptions of their involvement in resident and family handbooks—guiding documents that serve as touchstones for communication between LTRC facilities and families. We note discrepancies between the impoverished descriptions of family engagement in handbooks and the complex labour undertaken by many family/friend carers in LTRC. These discrepancies reinforce the invisibility of unpaid care and an undervaluing of the skills involved in this labour. To conclude, we suggest an addition to handbooks that could serve to better recognize the involvement of family members and friends in LTRC.