Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care

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See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down. It’s a creative, nurturing approach that stands in contrast to Britain’s emaciated care system, according to Bunting’s book. Labours of Love weaves together her experience shadowing employees across the care sector – nurses, doctors, social workers, in-home carers, care home workers – with context on the funding of public services. Bunting puts several benchmarks into comparison with other European countries, noting for example that the average hospital stay in France is 10 days, compared with seven in the UK; and that the ratio of nurses per 100,000 of the population is now almost half the level it is in Sweden, Germany and France. However, I did love hearing more from Marion Coutts, the author of the 2015 Wellcome Book Prize winner, The Iceberg, about her husband’s death from brain cancer.

As we face a second wave of Covid-19, there are more proposals for reinvestment in the care economy, for the redesign of welfare, for collective solutions that might revalue jobs in care. The most quietly damning line of all in Labours of Love, Madeleine Bunting’s new book on Britain’s collapsing care system, is probably the following. Short sections between chapters on the history of individual keywords – care, empathy, kindness, compassion, pity, dependence, suffering – offer food for thought. Without them we can not thrive as individuals and as a nation, we risk having to give up work when those who depend on us cannot find the care they need and our NHS and national prosperity, underpinned by social care, will not survive. We use cookies on this site to understand how you use our content, and to give you the best browsing experience.Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications that are exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. I'm acutely aware that paid carers are appallingly underpaid and underappreciated, but I hadn't realised that there are people who willingly accept that when they could easily get better-paid and more prestigious jobs because they find it so rewarding. Bunting condemns the political dimensions of needlessly imposed austerity policies, with their disastrous outcomes for care. I particularly enjoyed the section at the end of each chapter, where Bunting explores our changing understanding of the word “care” by offering definitions of associated words and examining their historical context.

It's a word that's replaced a rich vocabulary of terms, bring aspects of medical and social services that were all previously regarded as separate under a single rubric.

And they provide the vast bulk of the army of healthcare workers in the NHS (80 per cent) and social-care workers (82 per cent) for the long-term sick, disabled and frail elderly.