Health care cuts are hurting women
Margaret's fit and healthy husband became an invalid overnight, after a series of minor strokes left him unable to speak or swallow. The hospital discharged him early when his bed was required by someone more sick.
Margaret was given little information about how to look after him, or even what to do if he choked. The children did their best to help, but all had jobs and families of their own. Community support was almost non-existent, apart from a GP who agreed to provide emergency care if needed. Margaret had to give up her job, is virtually housebound and wonders when, if ever, normal life will return.
Margaret's story is told in a report released last week by Melbourne's Health Issues Centre. A Woman's Work is Never Done: the Impact of Shifting Care out of Hospitals reveals that women are increasingly being expected to provide the care and rehabilitation in the home that was previously provided by hospitals and other health services.
Often isolated and unaware of the few support services that are available, women carers confront tasks they are unprepared and untrained for, such as lifting patients or changing dressings.
Many of these women work outside the home and are faced with a "choice" between leaving work to care for an ill family member and frequently having to take time off work, deal with unsympathetic employers and possibly lose their jobs anyway.
Another report released this week, Australia's Mothers and Babies 1995, showed that new mothers are also being discharged from hospital earlier. The report, compiled by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, showed that the proportion of mothers staying in hospital for fewer than four days was up 20.2% from four years earlier.
While hospitals claim this is a positive step, at the same time as mothers' hospital stays are shortened, public services for mothers and children are being cut back. New mothers are being expected to cope with the often overwhelming task of caring for a new baby with no support outside the family.
Marilyn Gullemin, who compiled A Woman's Work is Never Done from research and interviews with carers, says that women are not necessarily willing or able to care for the sick and elderly. "There should not be the expectation that there will be someone at home and that it will be a woman."
The report has called for employers and state and federal governments to generate policies to help women carers, including paid emergency leave entitlements for all workers.
While such measures should be supported, they do not address the real issue, which is governments' austerity policies. The de-funding of women's services, and cuts to child-care and services for the sick and elderly, are an integral part of big business's agenda of maximising profits by cutting social spending to the minimum.
To justify the cuts, John Howard and other politicians reinforce the ideology of the family as the place where these services should be provided, and of women as the "natural" (and unpaid) providers.
We must do more than call for a better deal for women caring for the sick. We must campaign against the cuts and fight for an expansion of community health care, hospitals and other public support services, so that the burden of care is taken by society as a whole — not individual women in the home.
By Bronwen Beechey