Finnish eldercare services in crisis: the viewpoint of rural home care workers

Abstract

This is a case study and illustration of professional rural home care workers’ present situation in some districts of Central Finland after a recent service reform at the grass-root level. Our research question is: what has the impact of the PARAS-reform been on professional agency of rural care workers in the subject-centred sociocultural framework? We investigate the experiences of 10 interviewed rural care workers from the viewpoint of their professional agency by means of thematically oriented content analysis. The research results confirm moral and political tensions between the economical thinking of care management and the home care workers’ practices of good caring. After the reform the professional agency of social care staff has narrowed and their autonomy concerning contextual and relational decisions in elderly care has been severely undermined. Since professional agency at work is not merely practical but also discursive, emotional and deeply embodied as well as a historically constructed entity, the outcome might be that traditional human care ethics is gradually lost, and the ethically most committed care givers leave the field. In conditions of insufficient number of service personnel this is a threat to the social care system.

Keywords:

• social home care services
• professional agency
• service reform
• home care workers