It seems like there’s one story after another at the moment about vulnerable old people being neglected in hospitals, “care homes” and even in their own homes where home “carers” are failing to provide the “minimum standards of care” – even, according the most recent reports, to the extent that their are breaches of basic human rights.
It makes you wonder about the word “care”.
Within the health service and the “care” industry there’s been an increase in setting standards, developing procedures to record activities and the government’s response to this latest report is to talk of strengthening the inspection systems.
Is this the answer? To set higher “standards”, and to ratchet up the monitoring and inspection processes?
I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem to be enough. The missing link, is, I believe, a prioritisation of people.
What does it mean to be human? If we reduce a human being in any way, we start to lose the very essence of being human. A human being can neither be reduced to an object to be acted on, nor a means of carrying out procedure without losing something. Every human being is unique and lives constantly with a subjective experience of reality. If we forget that we start to act towards each other as if others are objects.
What we need is to reclaim the values – that the most important thing is to care – to feel empathy towards, compassion towards the people – both the people in need of care, and those delivering it. We need to treat people as whole people, not as tasks to be carried out or completed.
Heroes Not Zombies 
Having been a caregiver myself, I can say with certainty that this is true. I think that people get bogged down in the idea of the “job” that needs to get done, without stopping to think that the “job” is secondary to the person.
I love that you point out that caregiving, at least, as it’s commonly practiced, reduces the caregiver as well. I struggled to keep my and my mother’s humanity first and foremost throughout her dying process; I wanted to be WITH her and to be recognized for that – most important – part of the work that I was doing. The cleaning and feeding and medicating were entirely secondary to the love, but it was the cleaning and feeding and medicating for which I was most often recognized.
[…] That really is the trouble with health care – see my recent post about finding the person in the patient, and the earlier one about people not processes. […]