Philip Y. Kao PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

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Mistakes were made in the field. There were multiple instances where the sheer time
pressure of getting ten people out of bed (teeth-cleaned and dressed) within a two-hour
window caused me to make mistakes. I left people sitting on the toilet waiting for a fairly
long time, while I tended to someone else. At work, I often found myself overwhelmed
with stress. I also tore people’s thin skin inadvertently when I dressed them too quickly.
The stress and the fighting between caregivers was a common theme, which the
management tried hard to control. Yet in my mind, the way that we had to inhabit our
institutional roles as caregivers in the face of a system we had no easy explanation for
meant that we transferred much of our anxiety and fears onto each other.
Nancy Foner’s study of the nursing home points to how women rely on kinship ties to
obtain their jobs (Foner 1995). Even in nursing homes, Foner shows how women can
bring home into the shop floor, by bringing family values and roles to the job. Rather
than seeing this as simply humanising the workspace, Foner is right to suggest that
bringing in the family can sometimes impinge on work. In a setting like Tacoma
Pastures, nursing aides also have to contend with resident spouses and family members
who also provide caregiving, albeit informally in an institutional setting.
Even though Tacoma Pastures staff members and directors often refer to themselves as
being part of the Tacoma Pastures family, the bottom line is that caregivers are the ones
who are more than family member substitutes, their “work draws and builds on and
simultaneously reinforces their role and identity as nurturant caregivers in their own
families” (Foner 1995, 119). Furthermore, the Tacoma Pastures’s directors may say that
the caregivers should act as brothers and sisters for the sake of a shared sense of
responsibility, but even this has its limits. For one thing, the directors certainly do not
want this solidarity to turn into organised resistance.
The caregivers at Tacoma Pastures never talk about or think about themselves in kinship
terms with one another. Moreover, the informal rule that caregivers never report to
nurses or supervisors did not apply in Tacoma Pastures. If anything, caregivers were
scared of messing up in front of their fellow caregivers. An instance occurred at Tacoma
Pastures where I was the one being reported on. Jessica, a newly hired Tacoma Pastures
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