COVER STORY

Ahead of National Carers Week, three strong individuals open up about the many challenges they’ve faced since dedicating their lives to helping loved ones

Meet three of the many unsung heroes who have dedicated their lives to caring for loved ones

Oh my god, is this my life – for the rest of my life?” Vicki Kember was at her lowest ebb, caring for her teenage daughter diagnosed with mental illness. While dealing with her daughter’s depression, anxiety and self-harming, Kember dreaded the thought that her life might always be that of the informal carer.

Like Kember, an estimated 2.8 million Australians are informal carers and the number is increasing. Tasmania – with the most aged population in the country – is at the forefront of the explosion in carers. So who are they? Why is theirs a secret life? And what is the significance of their largely unrecognised role when it comes to reforms in aged care, mental health and social services?

Unlike most occupations, informal caring doesn’t come with a job description or wage. You can be an 80-year-old carer, like Lindsay Ranson, or a teenage carer, like Debaki Thapa. You might be caring for sick parents, a spouse with dementia or a child suffering from anxiety or depression. Through no fault of your own, you can find your life turned upside-down, unable to leave the house. You might be forced to change jobs, move home, or risk your marriage to care for your loved one. You might have to stop going to school, or learn to cook, deal with your partner’s incontinence, or put up with sneering from people with little tolerance for your role – perhaps because it is so invisible.

Fact: if you help someone out around the house with daily tasks, take them shopping or help with child care – for as little as an hour a day, at least one day a week – then you are a carer.

You care because you love. And yet, despite everything you do – the quiet serving, the denial of your own needs, even the challenge of making something as simple as a hair appointment for yourself – you refuse to be identified as a carer. You therefore opt out of the supports that go with that, and/or you go missing from the caring providers’ agenda, because you see it as a natural duty, a responsibility that cannot be professionalised.

It’s not something you feel can be reduced to a unit costing in someone’s budget. Nevertheless, a report commissioned by Mind Australia in 2016 estimated the replacement cost of informal care at $60.3 billion annually.

Even professionalised roles – formal carers – are straining to keep up with growing demand. The Government’s figures, for example, show more than 50,000 older Australians are awaiting a home-care package, with an additional 35,000 people receiving services below their assessed level of need.

For National Carers’ Week, which starts tomorrow, TasWeekend spoke to the heads of three state peak bodies working in the carer space: Mental Health Carers Tasmania, Carers Tasmania and Alzheimer’s Australia. All report the sector being “at a crossroads” and see a crisis looming. While welcoming reforms for care recipients through the National Disability Insurance Scheme, they say the support role of carers is being overlooked – even by the care providers.

“When the NDIS is rolled out more fully in Tasmania, I fear carers will miss out altogether,” says Maxine Griffiths, chief executive of Mental Health Carers Tasmania.