The Ethics of Care and the Newfoundland Paid Family Caregiver Program: An Assessment

Abstract

The ethics of care has gained traction as a feminist normative lens from which to examine policies and policy issues. This thesis aims to contribute to this growing literature by employing a critical ethics of care lens to assess a new long-term care initiative in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. This initiative, called the Newfoundland Paid Family Caregiver Program, allows eligible participants to pay family members for some care services. This analysis uncovers numerous tensions, both practical and theoretical, related to the way this program (re)organizes care. Specifically, the ways in which this program downloads caring responsibilities onto the family and monetizes caring relations is discussed. Finally, this analysis explores what care policies starting from the premises of a critical ethics of care might look like, and argues that such policies would have greater reach and positive consequences in terms of (re)producing healthy, flourishing lives for us all.iii

Questioning “choice”: A multinational metasynthesis of research on directly funded home‐care programs for older people

“…These nuanced understandings of care have evolved over an extended period of time and series of debates, and yet the studies surveyed in this metasynthesis largely do not reflect the insights of this scholarship. Perhaps DF programs could be developed and evaluated through a lens of a critical, political ethics of care (FitzGerald Murphy, ; FitzGerald Murphy, ; Hankivsky, ) or from rejections of care from disability perspectives that serve as valuable interventions in the ways we presume that home care should be. Starting from these different conceptual framings may point to new avenues of research and move the literature beyond the discourse of “choice” identified in this critical qualitative metasynthesis.…”