The meanings of long-term care work in Portugal: national report

Abstract

There is no formal concept of care work in Portugal. The word 'carer' (Cuidador), which has a gender inflexion for the female form (Cuidadora) - which is the form that is used more often - has been historically used to designate informal carers or, in some cases, carers directly employed by the person receiving care or by his/her family to provide in-house care. Professionals employed in the care sector are not usually designated as carers but rather identified by the specific professional group they belong to. More recently, and as the private commercial homecare services market grew, the workers of these services that visit users at their homes are sometimes called carers. There are two main groups of workers in the LTC sector mirroring a fundamental split between healthcare and social care. Care work is generally regarded as unfairly treated in the labour market, namely because is has poor salaries, hard working conditions and little social recognition.. There is also a general perception that there are shortages of care workers. This shortage is explained by the low attractiveness of care work but also because of how the LTC system is set up. Quality of care work is analysed along two main ideas. On the one hand low quality of care provision is explained by lack of qualifications of workers. This applies mostly to those employed in the social care sector. On the other hand, low quality of care services is explained by the shortage of workers, leading to overburden and low motivation. Migrant care workers are a relatively recent phenomenon, but there is a shared understanding of their relevance for the sustainability of LTC in the country. Informal care provision, even if currently formally recognised, is still not described as care work but rather as caring (Cuidar) or even looking after (Tomar Conta). The word in Portuguese merges the idea of looking after someone and carries a meaning that is generally associated to relationships of affection between carer and cared after. Debates about care work are very much confined to discussions about shortage of workers and strategies to increase attractiveness and capacity of retention of workers.