ABSTRACT
For 60 years in modern healthcare systems the hospital has been the preferred site of care. However care is currently undergoing a process of (re) domestication and (de)medicalization. Owing to a combination of economic, demographic and ideological factors, ‘home care’ has gradually come to be regarded as the gold standard for the organization of care in both institutional and domiciliary contexts. While home care policies serve a range of professional and political agenda, they contain unacknowledged contradictions and strains for the cared-for, families and waged carers. In this paper I draw on two ethnographic studies of caring work undertaken in the United Kingdom (UK) over the last decade (Allen 2000a, 2000b, 2002a, 2002b) and scholarship on ‘home-care’ in the context of dying (Exley and Allen 2007) to examine some effects of these trends on the caring division of labor, our understanding of social and health care and the relationship between caring about someone and caring for them.
