Why can’t men like my proud dad have male carers?
THE girls were always young, normally just scraping into their 20s. Local, with thick Cornish accents and sweet smiles, hair pulled back and usually a tattoo or two poking out from beneath their tabards.
During the last year of his life, these girls spoon-fed my sickly father, combed his hair, helped him into his clothes and led him by the elbow down the strip-lit corridor of the dementia care home where he lived. They sponge-bathed him, gave him his pills. and tried to calm him down when he shouted.
And, seemingly every time that I visited from London, they were different faces from last time. An endless revolving door of Hayleys, Michelles and Claires, who started at the care home in lieu of other work, only to leave again shortly afterwards.
I don’t blame them, frankly. I wouldn’t want that job. Day in, day out of wiping bottoms, holding hands, disinfecting sticky corridors. Trying not to dwell on the terrible cries of people who have lost themselves. And all for the minimum wage.
As a society we don’t value this work. This outsourcing of caring, from family to state, is low-status and poorly paid.
And, as I realised during my father Peter’s decline, it’s almost entirely done by women.
He died in October 2013 aged 78, around three years after his diagnosis of vascular dementia. After managing at home with the help of visiting carers for two years, (he and Mum are divorced), he moved to a care home at the beginning of 2012. In all that time, I recall only one male carer.
This week, the charity Care England argued there was a need for more male care workers because of the growing number of elderly men.
The body, which represents care homes and companies, called on the Government to head a drive to recruit men to work in homes. Professor Martin Green, of Care England, said: ‘We have an ageing population, and a lot of people who receive care into old age now are men; the majority of carers are women. When it comes to personal care in particular, some men prefer this to be done by a male rather than a female.’
Professor Green told Radio 4’s Today programme that ‘entrenched societal perceptions’ prevent men from taking jobs as carers.
‘The problem is that people always see caring roles as being female roles,’ he added. ‘We need to make society understand that everyone has the potential to be a carer.’
This is absolutely right. After all, it’s not as if men lack a caring gene. My emotional, warm, temperamental father, who sobbed at sad films and was generous with his hugs, was abundant proof to me of that.
With shared parental leave, we’ve acknowledged that a significant proportion of men would like to spend time looking after their babies.
And the childcare industry has also made efforts to recruit more men to work in nurseries, citing the different qualities and perspectives they can offer children. So why shouldn’t people, men and women, at the end of their lives also benefit from the masculine touch?
For men like my father, of a certain generation and used to working in a man’s world, there is much to be said for more male carers.
While his generation might not expect such gender diversity themselves — they would probably be among the first to assume caring is ‘women’s work’ — there is no doubt that they would benefit from it. EvEn in his fractured state, my father felt an obligation to tiredly flirt with the young women looking after him, twinkling vaguely in their direction. At least, until he got too ill to even recognise they were female.
And while I can’t say that he hated this exactly, it obliged him to follow tramlines of behaviour that it might have been liberating for him to discard, especially when being washed or dressed.
A private man, he would have hated every part of his illness, but the lack of dignity it afforded him would have been the cruellest blow.
In a sense, his worsening mental state actually served as some sort of protection from these humiliations in that at least he was incapable of being offended or embarrassed by the succession of young women tending to his most intimate needs.
Before his illness, he ran a successful car dealership for many years and could chat endlessly about different models. With characteristic contrariness, he privately professed to hate cars, but it’s what he knew and had spent his life working with.
It’s a stereotype, yes, but perhaps a few more men around him could have helped him occasionally to tap into this distant area of expertise, allowing him a glimpse of erstwhile dignity in the midst of his disintegration.
not only that, but more male voices could have provided the kind of banter that he was once used to, propping up the bar, an echo of the world that he had once inhabited.
That said, he was lucky in that there was one male influence in his care home. The endless girls, who seemed to change so often, were flanked by an older male nurse. He was involved in all aspects of looking after my father, including the more intimate aspects of care that our society seems to assume only women are fit for.
His manner — direct to the point of being brusque — was a contrast to the deference of the younger women. And while I can’t say that I always warmed to him, he did command a respect, from patients and families alike, that provided a refreshing, and necessary, counterpoint.
Part of this was just down to his age and personality, but some of it was also simply because he was a man. But he was the only one. And, while I’m sure that’s representative of other care homes across the country, it does seem a tremendous pity.
As increased equality in so many areas gives men and women the right to shake off those ‘societal perceptions’ that Professor Green identified, it seems obvious that this should extend to caring.
For men have so much to offer in this field of work. For a start, care work is often backbreakingly physical — with lifting of bed-bound patients to be done, wheelchairs to be pushed, elderly people to be supported in the shower.
But, far more importantly than that, many men could excel at the empathy, patience and warm-heartedness required.
These aren’t merely female virtues — some women are capable of it and so are some men. To assume otherwise does a huge disservice to everyone, undervaluing the significance of the work that is so hugely important.
Because done well, caring can be nothing short of life-changing for patients and their fami- lies —as I witnessed first-hand. Before my father went into the residential home, he had care at home in his little granite cottage. And one of those carers, found via a newspaper advert, was like an angel sent into our lives.
She radiated kindness and positivity, sorting out Dad and our family when we couldn’t see anything straight. Moreover, she clearly took pride in her work and approached it with a dignity that was written all over her face.
I don’t think it’s an assumption to say that her life was enriched by what she did, helping vulnerable people. She made it seem so obvious — and, after all, what at the end of the day is more important? BUT such job satisfaction seemed in short supply once my father was moved to the residential home. Which isn’t to say there weren’t lots of well-intentioned people doing their best.
I will for ever be grateful to those girls who tended so patiently to him as he descended to death. For a long while, they did something that I wasn’t personally prepared to, something I couldn’t face.
But I can’t remember what a single one of them was called. And I can’t help but think that if more men occupied the same roles, maybe that wouldn’t be the case. Perhaps caring wouldn’t be such an overlooked profession, paid so woefully, picked up by well-meaning women between babies who often don’t know how else to pay the bills.