Het delen van mantelzorg: wat zijn de overwegingen?

Due to social, political, and demographic developments in Dutch healthcare, the pressure on informal carers of vulnerable, senior citizens living at home continues to increase. To relieve this pressure, people in the senior citizens’ social network are looking for ways to share care tasks with others. However, many informal caregivers seem to experience a threshold in this respect.

This pilot study focuses on understanding the considerations involved in sharing caregiving tasks with others. Therefore, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six informal caregivers of single, senior citizens living at home. This study shows that these considerations are characterised by a relationship between informal caregivers’ workload, their shyness to ask others for help, and the perception of care recipients’ demand, combined with informal caregivers’ natural inclination to do it themselves. Feelings of being responsible for the care and behaviour of care recipients, and the choices that must be made for them seem to play an additional role. To develop adequate solutions that lead to sharing informal care with others, and relieving the pressure on informal caregivers, more insight into the (personal) mechanisms behind this sense of responsibility seems necessary.