Informal care is a term that we may be familiar with, or may have heard, but what exactly does it mean? What do we mean by informal care? Let’s take a look at the situation in Belgium.
Different definitions of informal care?
If we look at different definitions of informal care and compare them, we see that they all contain the same elements: voluntary care for a known person who is in need of care.
However, some sociologists define informal care very extensively as a collective term for the non-professional, voluntary provision of non-medical help and services to care recipients (friends, neighbors, family members) with whom the care provider has an initial socio-affective bond. , The standard example of the informal caregiver is the daughter or son who provides non-medical assistance to his or her sick and needy parent(s). Together with self-care, informal care forms the informal sector. It is distinguished from volunteer work by the lack of a more or less organized context in which this takes place, although there are more and more elements that point to a more organized or formalized character of informal care. The latter include:
- the informal care allowances of certain municipalities, provinces or OCMWs
- the health insurance that provides the opportunity to financially support informal care in a more general and systematic manner through a system of care vouchers
The office of the Minister of Welfare (Belgium) sees an informal caregiver as a person who, based on a social and emotional bond , helps and supports another person, not professionally but more than occasionally, in daily life when self-care proves inadequate.
Finally, there is the definition of other sociologists, which is short and clear: informal care is the care that is not provided in the context of a profession or organized volunteer work to a housemate, family member, friend, acquaintance or neighbor, who needs care because of illness, disability or old age.
The role of informal care
The care provided by informal caregivers is situated on the so-called zero line. She is outside the professional circuit, but is an indispensable link in the current world of home care. It is partly due to the support of informal caregivers that people can continue to live at home for much longer and that they can also return home much more quickly after admission to hospital. These last two trends, also sometimes called the extramuralization of care, are increasingly being pursued by policy in order to reduce costs.
Informal care in figures
In the course of 2003, the Center for Population and Family Studies organized a survey among 4,000 registered informal caregivers between the ages of 25 and 79 with the aim of mapping the reality and experience of these people. The results of the research provide us with a lot of useful information about the gender and age of registered informal caregivers. But it is also a rich source of information as far as the person in need of care is concerned. In this way, care is taken first and foremost for one’s own father or mother, then for the partner in need of care and then for a child. Only a small minority takes on the care of a neighbor, acquaintance, friend, brother or sister.
However, this research only studied registered informal caregivers. These are informal caregivers whose care recipients received health insurance benefits. In addition, there are still many people in need of care who rely on informal caregivers but are nevertheless not eligible for health insurance premiums and are therefore not included in the aforementioned study. In order to receive benefits from this health insurance policy, a number of criteria must be met that clearly demonstrate that people are in serious need of care and are dependent on help from others in various areas of life. It therefore goes without saying that such screening leaves out many people who do indeed rely on informal caregivers but are not ,registered,. The data from this mentioned study must therefore certainly be put into perspective. Moreover, the study was carried out among 4,000 informal caregivers, while an estimate was made in 1998 in the context of the Panel Study of Belgian households, which resulted in 280,000 informal caregivers in Flanders. The figures presented regarding informal care may therefore not be entirely representative of all informal caregivers.
Strictly defining who is an informal caregiver or who provides informal care is difficult. Every informal care situation is different and it is therefore necessary to fully analyze each situation. In practice, anyone can be an informal caregiver.