The Changing Geography of Care

Abstract

Within human geography we have seen the emergence of a wide - ranging debate around care in recent years. One significant strand of this debate has focused on care as an ethical concern – one that incorporates such issues as difference, beneficence, citizenship, rights, and responsibilities. Here, the ethics of care has been considered across a range of spatial scales that stretch from the global to the highly place - specific. Though these are highly important and topical issues, we should not forget that the discourse of care also holds considerable meaning for those working within geographies of health and social care. Here, care is largely interpreted within a relational framework that examines the linkages between health and care - giving, the places in which it occurs, and those charged with its delivery. This is of particular importance in many advanced capitalist countries, where health and social care policies have focused increasingly on the development of services designed to support care - giving in community and home - based settings rather than the large institutional settings that predominated in the past. Such shifts in where care takes place have implications for who is responsible for the delivery of that care. The turn to neo-liberalism and third way approaches to health and welfare, in countries such as the United Kingdom, North America, and New Zealand, for example, has placed increasing emphasis on informal care - giving through the family and the voluntary sector. In this chapter we, thus, focus on the new spaces of care identified within contemporary geographical research and in particular we examine the increasing role played by the voluntary and informal sectors in the delivery of health care provision.