Making a commitment to care - 2024 01 26
I have been processing the time records from 2022 and thinking about how impossible it was that I was trying to take care of Mom, a frail elder with complex health issues, and work full time. Even if you remove my attempt to maintain my fulltime paid work, the fact that I was on caregiving duty each month, sometimes exceeding 600 hours in a single month, often more than 550, never less than 500, was already an impossible workload to survive with any degree of success. In early April, 2022, I wrote to my friend, a health science professional, about the situation I was in, "I wonder if we have an accurate assessment of the real cost of transferring primary caregiving duties into home-based care and how those costs are being calculated, factored and substantially shared by stakeholder institutions - institutional providers, municipal government, provincial government, health services, federal government. These are my top-of-mind thoughts after our discussion on Tuesday. What I noti...