Please see below selected recent care-related change.
See also:
September 2024
- Self-care can mean different things to different people. For example, the World Health Organisation defines self-care as “the ability of individuals, families, and communities to promote health, prevent disease, maintain health, and cope with illness and disability with or without the support of a health worker.” However, as self-care has become more mainstream in recent years, it’s widely understood as a practise of tuning into personal needs and taking time to improve physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. Some researchers define it as “the self-initiated behaviour that people choose to incorporate to promote good health and general wellbeing.”, while some use it to deal with stress or difficult life situations, and others as a way of maintaining day-to-day happiness.
July 2024
- Elissa Strauss, author of When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, argued that, because of a fundamental lack of curiosity around the experience of care in the wider culture, our language when speaking about it is often stunted. We may notice that many people tend to fall into using simplistic clichés that paint care as harmonious, heroic or hellish - denying care complexity and nuance. So, as hard as it can be, Strauss advises that we try to avoid speaking about care as a fairytale or as a nightmare, but instead speak about the messy middle, and ground it in the very real humans and relationships involved.
April 2024
- A white paper on the Future of the Care Economy called on leaders worldwide to prioritise the care sector. It shed light on the state of the care economy, emphasising its critical importance to economic growth and societal well-being. Focusing on overcoming systemic inequities and adapting to demographic changes, employment trends and skill requirements, the paper identified care as a key driver of prosperity. A proposed framework encouraged collaboration across sectors to enhance care systems, incorporating design principles and success factors for robust development and a more inclusive and prosperous future.
August 2023
- A growing ageing population is on the horizon, as countries around the world from Japan to the US will need to find ways to support more older people than ever before. Crowded nursing homes and staffing shortages leave much to be desired in terms of where and how to grow old. The future of home care and independent living may lie in an alternative: AI. For example, Care Daily is the creator of AI Caregiver, software which can connect hundreds of devices and products, providing data on behavioural routines and biometrics to familial caregivers and professional healthcare providers.
December 2022
- Further reading:
July 2022
- Gallup advises organisations to give leaders time and training to understand employees as individuals and learn what caring really looks and sounds like: active, employee-oriented and engaging. And to measure change, because care affects business.
June 2022
- The American philosopher Eva Feder Kittay argued for ‘a public ethic of care based on the idea that we are all embedded in nested dependencies’ and that society has an ‘obligation and responsibility’ to support caring relations between people, whether that caring relation takes place in or outside a family, or between a client and a professional. We must learn to acknowledge the millions of ‘vulnerable carers’ among us, and learn how to acknowledge our needs and vulnerabilities when we become carers, too.
- An analysis of the UK’s 2011 Census by the Office for National Statistics showed that there were around 5.8 million (or one in 10) people in England and Wales providing unpaid care for a friend or family member. A US survey in 2015 found that approximately 43.5 million (one in around seven) people had been unpaid caregivers to an adult or child in the previous 12 months.
- Further reading:
January 2022
- The pandemic exacted a heavy toll on working caregivers. According to BCG’s COVID-19 caregiver survey, those with paying jobs who also provide care for family members, including children and aging parents,felt greater stress than noncaregiving employees. More than half of working parents reported that their overall responsibilities at home - including housework, childcare, and help with schoolwork - had grown significantly. Many caregivers felt caught in the impossible situation of having to choose between caring for loved ones and preserving their careers.
September 2021
- Gallup believes that, in the workplace, feeling cared for comes from a manager-employee relationship developed in an "ecosystem of care". Managers in that kind of cultural ecosystem pay attention to employees' wellbeing because they know it influences the work and the worker. They see employees as people and people management as coaching. And because they care about the employee as a whole person, managers actively invite employees' input.
May 2021
- The Financial Times pointed to World Health Organisation estimates that there will be a global healthcare workforce gap of 14.5m by 2030. The factors that have contributed to the boom in social care include an ageing population, longer life expectancies, growth in the number of chronic health conditions and the Covid-19 pandemic. Some countries have started to implement programmes to encourage people to join the sector. According to McKinsey research, Singapore, for example, has created opportunities for 250,000 foreign domestic workers, with demand for care workers in the country set to increase by 300,000 by 2030.
March 2021
- For The Futures Centre, COVID exposed fault lines in our capacity for care. While care is a major function of the family, our need for it has always stretched beyond what a family can deliver. Most of us draw on a wide range of support networks (friendships, peer groups, communities) and public or paid services (creches, carers, care homes) throughout our lifetimes. By confining care to a limited number of people and places, the pandemic has highlighted the unbounded nature of co-dependence, while causing the burden to fall disproportionately on certain members of society - in particular women, single parents and frontline care workers.
December 2020
- The care economy – comprising everything that invests in developing human capacities: education, health, child and elder care, therapy, coaching, community care, etc. – is likely to prove a growing part of future economies.
- Small investments in important relationships can have big impacts, writes author Greg McKeown, who encourages sharing simple messages of support to those important to you. Paraphrasing former at-risk child turned advocate and author Josh Shipp, McKeown says: “We're all just one caring person away from being a success story.”
- The School of Life argued that we should never allow ourselves to forget that, whatever the surface indifference of others, we are surrounded by people who, when they see an emergency in front of them, will jump into icy rivers to rescue total strangers. If we know unambiguously that someone needs us a lot right now, we will probably drop everything and run to assist. But at the same time, we are hopeless at reading minds or taking hints. The next time we are in trouble, we must remember not to hate ourselves for requiring help and should call out, hopeful in the knowledge that most people around us will respond to our pain once it reaches their ears.
- The future of health is changing rapidly, claimed EY, as health systems move beyond digital, beyond connected, to fully leveraging the world of artificial intelligence and smart technologies. Digital innovation is accelerating and giving rise to the care models of tomorrow — many of which can only be imagined today. Interconnecting people, the environment and infrastructure as a unified, intelligent, data-optimised system of care is the point where health becomes "smart".
January 2020
- Women’s unpaid care work has a monetary value of $10.8 trillion a year. That’s three times the size of the world’s tech industry, according to Oxfam. All this unpaid care work leaves women and girls over 15 time-poor and “unable to meet their basic needs or to participate in social and political activities”. Not only that, but globally, 42% of women of working age are actually unable to hold down a job because of their unpaid care responsibilities, compared to 6% of men. But the good news is investing in care-supporting infrastructure, like access to water, sanitation and electricity, can really help, says Oxfam. “In low-income communities in India, in households with access to electricity, girls spend half an hour less each day on care work – and 47 minutes longer sleeping.”
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