Carers uncared for: Lack of regulations make home nurses vulnerable in Keralam

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In most cases, there are no legal employment contracts for caregivers listing out their working conditions and they are left to the mercy of the families engaging them. | Photo Credit: File photo

For more than two years, Lissy Sunny, a 48-year-old home nurse from Wayanad, has been attending to an elderly woman with dementia.

Lissy stays with the family that hired her to take care of the ageing woman.

Every morning, after feeding the bedridden woman, Lissy rushes to the kitchen to prepare food for the four-member family with whom she is staying. Her everyday chores end late in the night, long after the family members retire to bed.

All that she is paid for the tiring job is ₹22,000 a month, from which she needs to shell out ₹2,500 as commission to the agent who found her the job.

Geetha Gopi, a home nurse from Alakode in Kannur district, earns less than Lissy and is paid a monthly salary of ₹18,000. She does not know how much money her agent collects from the family. But she needs to pay the agency, which has engaged her, a monthly commission of ₹2,500.

With the changing social patterns where youngsters are moving out of the State in search of greener pastures and leaving behind their parents at home, elderly care has become a matter of serious concern for a large number of families. The support of caregivers like Lissy and Geetha has thus become inevitable for most of the families to take care of their elders. Even though in high demand, the caregivers are often exploited and underpaid and even denied proper rest. The service of the caregivers often goes unrewarded and unrecognised, complain those in the sector.

“Other than the salary, we are not offered any allowances or incentives for the tedious work we undertake. We work for meagre wages for more than 20 hours a day and that too often without proper rest or reward. Most of the workers have opted for the job due to the financial crisis. Despite the hard work, we are left with no savings. At times, a major portion of the income has to be set apart for medical or travel expenses as we are not covered by any social security schemes,” says Geetha.

The home care agencies that assign work to the caregivers collect service charges from both the families and the home nurses. The agencies often collect the salary of the workers and their commission in advance from the families concerned. Some agencies even demand an amount equivalent to a month’s salary as a security deposit from the families, say those in the sector.

“Though the worker would be informed about their monthly salary, they would be kept in the dark about the money the agencies collect from the employer families,” says Sunitha Raja, a home nurse who earlier worked as an agent in a home care agency in Koyilandy in Kozhikode.

Though the agencies offering the service of home nurses are often blamed for the ills plaguing the sector, many people like N.