Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care

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White vans juddered to a halt to let me cross the roads; the beleaguered assistant in the Co-op came out from behind the till to help me pack.

Even on the most basic healthcare insurance, after the birth of my child I spent five days in hospital recovering from an emergency C-section, which is considered normal here but contrasts to three to four days in the UK. Where this approach has resulted in poor care, such as in the notorious case of Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, health managers respond with programmes and associated performance indicators to promote compassion, as if this can be legislated and quantified. It seems tied up in Bunting’s fight for well-resourced health and social services is the very struggle for recognition that disabled, sick and elderly people have a right to exist in warranting such costs.She has received a number of awards and prizes including an honorary fellowship from Cardiff University in 2013, the Portico Prize for The Plot in 2010, a Lambeth MA degree in 2006, The Race in the Media award in 2005 and the Imam wa Amal Special Award in 2002.

Bunting captures the commitment of many care workers who, while knowing themselves demeaned as ‘just’ carers, suggest to her: ‘I am not bothered. This places care firmly at odds with hegemonic market ideologies fetishising youth, individual resilience, ambition and productivity, thereby deepening the disavowal of human needs other than for self-care. Midwives, district nurses, ward sisters, GPs and chaplains, together with those caring for relatives, are all given a voice. Britain’s society lauds economic growth, productivity and profit over compassion, kindness and empathy.As Bunting explains, part of the knotty problem we’re facing today is the decade of austerity that followed the financial crisis of 2008. After all, the attentive, spontaneous nature of good caring relations involves those more subtle, tactile, visceral qualities necessary for communicating understanding, reassurance, comfort—far harder to encapsulate, let alone measure. The book interrogates the structural mechanisms of political exclusion inherent in welfare retrenchment and underscores how the neoliberal tenets of individualism and self-sufficiently harm both carer and recipient. In ‘Labours of Love’, Madeleine Bunting amplifies the voices of those who bear the brunt of the UK’s chronic health and social care crisis. We use cookies on this site to understand how you use our content, and to give you the best browsing experience.

The fact that books like this are relatively under-exposed relative to obvious comparators (see the huge numbers of books by surgeons, therapists etc) tells its own story in that respect. In one chapter, Bunting arrives at the offices of a voluntary-sector organization which supports families with a disabled child. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Care is a set of activities which, like music, poetry and art, makes us human: it reflects our capacity for tenderness and generosity, to reach beyond our own self-interest to serve the flourishing of another. Bunting’s chief assertion remains that human dignity relies on an embrace of the universal fact of illness, fragility and dependence. Suddenly, the past decade of underinvestment in health and social care took centre stage in political discourse, and the poorly paid labour of social care workers was deemed essential. They are agonised by the knowledge that they live in a society so uncaring, even cruel, towards their child. Every single person in the country should read this book, to understand some of the experiences of people who work in the health and social care sector, why they do it, and the huge value of the work that they do.

Social-work budget cuts leave social workers with overwhelming case numbers and reduced administrative staff, leaving no time to build relationships with families and provide comprehensive care. Do we believe as a country that we are both respecting and paying properly for the humane, often intimate, care that they give every day.She meant it as a warning in the face of “a crisis of unprecedented proportions” in the provision of health and social care across the UK. Smith’s abstracted homo economicus worked to invisibilize women and advocate for an ethics of care devoid of interdependency.