Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care

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Though they are frequently worn out from the Sisyphean labour of “rolling back anguish”, the care workers she speaks to remain endlessly curious about their patients or clients, wanting to hear life stories. 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. Yet “elder care” remains a source of rich pickings in the private sector, apparently recession-proof, especially for overseas investors. Bunting notes that many professionals she interviewed came from strongly religious backgrounds, even if they themselves were non-believers.

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.We use cookies on this site to understand how you use our content, and to give you the best browsing experience.

Used to the NHS, I found the process of browsing for a healthcare provider as if it was car insurance unsettling when I first moved here. Whether in surgeries or hospitals, she finds that underfunding and bureaucratic surveillance leaves doctors and nurses vastly overworked, doing as much form-filling as patient care, leading to burnout, staff losses and recruitment failures. Bunting’s book reveals a grim pattern: inadequate funding means inadequate staffing means inadequate care, sparking scandals such as the neglect that killed hundreds at a Mid Staffordshire hospital in the 2000s – which in turn ushers in well-meaning but burdensome bureaucracy.Labours of Love] should be compulsory reading for every MP, every manager in the NHS and the care "industry".

But that feels a lot like low-hanging fruit, compared with what the author identifies is a much bigger problem of just how difficult it is to be an effective carer to anyone who isn’t a close and loved family member. Covering several different types and stages of care, Madeleine Bunting takes a deep dive into the important but unspoken world of care. View image in fullscreen Sculptor Luke Perry’s medical worker, installed at a park near Birmingham, a tribute to care workers during the coronavirus pandemic. She spent time in surgeries, hospitals, care homes, households, shadowing doctors, nurses, social workers, and carers of every stripe, including, importantly, those dealing with death. Over five years, the author travelled the country, speaking to charity workers, doctors, social workers, in-home carers, nurses, palliative care teams and parents, to explore the value of care, the hidden glue that binds us together.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Computer technology puts everyone behind a screen and lands the burden of “data management” on to care workers or claimants. SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING Long before the pandemic, care work has been underpaid and its values disregarded. Although I felt the book lagged in places, I found the ethical considerations throughout thought-provoking, and Bunting’s humanising depiction of carers and recipients delicately handled.

However, apart from the briefest mention, disappointingly Bunting has little to say about the ambivalence and conflicts of caring, a topic many feminists have tackled well. Photograph: Lisa Miller/ "Hold Still" National Portrait Gallery Exhibition View image in fullscreen ‘It cannot easily be measured. Bunting draws on an impressive range of quotation and argument, from Rilke to Paula Rego; from Walt Whitman (who worked in the crowded military hospitals during the American civil war) to Martha Nussbaum and feminist philosophers of care. One social worker Bunting speaks with describes the trauma endured when cutting support desperate families rely on, leading him to have a breakdown and retrain in another field.

As we seek to rebuild society post-pandemic, this book suggests a possible future where investment in care is an economic, as well as a moral, imperative. This is the spirit that corporations exploit, leaving carers routinely battling poverty and exhausted by overwork.