Hospital Volunteers and Carework*

Abstract

L'auteure analyse les soins fournis par des bénévoles d'hôpitaux en utilisant des données d'entrevues, des descriptions de täches et des statistiques concernant les bénévoles de quatre hôpitaux d'Alberta, Canada. Les employés des hôpitaux s'attendent à ce que les bénévoles fournissent des soins instrumentaux et affectifs, mais ils restreignent également leur tàche en imposant des limites aux heures de travail réalisé par les bénévoles ainsi qu'à la somme d'information qu'ils reçoivent sur les patients. Les bénévoles surmontent ces contraintes en entretenant des conversations informelles destinées à augmenter leurs connaissances, tout en étant flexibles par rapport aux heures accordées aux patients, afin de pouvoir s'occuper de leurs besoins émotionnels. L'auteure considère également la répartition des sexes chez les bénévoles et l'influence qu'elle exerce sur leurs attentes. Carework done by hospital volunteers is examined using interview data, task descriptions and volunteer statistics from four hospitals in Alberta, Canada. Hospitals expect volunteers to provide instrumental and affective care but also constrain this work by limiting volunteers' work time and the amount of information they are given about patients. Volunteers overcome these constraints by initiating informal conversation to broaden their knowledge and capitalizing on flexibility in how they spend their time to attend to patients' emotional needs. I also consider how the volunteer workforce is gendered and how this influences expectations of volunteers.

Beyond choice: ‘Thick’ volunteering and the case of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution

“…Clary et al, 1998;Einolf, 2008;Finkelstein, 2008;Omoto et al, 2010); experiences of volunteering, meaning what is it like to be a volunteer, how organizational matters influence volunteering (e.g. Mellow, 2007;Haski-Leventhal & Bar-Gal, 2008;Kreutzer & Jager, 2010); and the personal, organizational or social consequences of volunteering (e.g. Handy et al, 2010;Hong & Morrow-Howell, 2010;O'Brien et al, 2010;Morrow-Howell, 2010).…”

Not just “sweet old ladies” – Challenges in voluntary work in the municipal long-term care services

“…Thus, specifying and dividing care into discrete tasks to be performed within a set time and in a standardised manner may undermine caring as a skilled, emotionally-involved practice. Nurses, for example, see it as their responsibility to care for the patient holistically, and also hold that certain aspects of their work are best carried out in relation to a broader scope of caring activities (Mellow, 2007). Doing a physical assessment of a patient whilst giving a bed bath, observing how a patient manages specific activities of daily living by being present at mealtimes or sharing a cup of coffee are examples of how nurses can gather important patient knowledge (Mellow, 2007).…”

“…Nurses, for example, see it as their responsibility to care for the patient holistically, and also hold that certain aspects of their work are best carried out in relation to a broader scope of caring activities (Mellow, 2007). Doing a physical assessment of a patient whilst giving a bed bath, observing how a patient manages specific activities of daily living by being present at mealtimes or sharing a cup of coffee are examples of how nurses can gather important patient knowledge (Mellow, 2007). At the present, however, there is a tendency for care work to be rigidly specified and scheduled on the basis of patient classification systems and divided between different types of care workers, paid and unpaid, as well as skilled ad unskilled, with qualified nurses increasingly being driven to perform both medical and administrative work (Kristiansen, Obstfelder, & Lotherington, 2015;Kristiansen, Westeren, Obstfelder, & Lotherington, 2016), as we shall outline below.…”

The dialectics of health and social care: toward a conceptual framework

“…Recent years have, for example, seen outstanding treatments of community care from an anthropological perspective (Twigg 2000), analyses of emotional labor in the fields of nursing and social work (Bolton 2005), institutional-ethnographic studies of the impact on care of new forms of management in hospitals and social-service agencies (e.g., Baines 2004), discussions of the ethics of care from the vantage point of political philosophy and critical social policy (Williams 1999), as well as psychoanalytical writing on care (Hollway 2006). A rich overlapping literature deals, for example, with aspects of giving, such as volunteering (Mellow 2007), and the role of the social economy in health and social care (Jetté 2008).…”