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

issue as well; caregivers are told that they must centre themselves first before they can
reach out and connect with their loved ones. The support group rhetoric places
emphasis on a particular bounded idea of the person. Therefore, caregiving as a
constructed relation with scripted roles, strategies, and priorities are imbued with ideas
of self-care, legal capacity, and the function and nature of social relations within the
family.
* * *
On the third floor in Memory Care, some of the caregivers were especially territorial in
the ways they approached their work. They attempted constantly to assert control over
their section and its residents. It was not uncommon for example, for a caregiver to deny
his/her fellow caregiver, whose section might consist of the odd number rooms on the
other side of that same corridor, from transferring or wheeling their resident from the
dining room back to the living room area. One time, a resident pushed her call button in
her room, complaining that her bed rails were broken. Seeing that her caregiver was
helping someone else in another room, I came to the rescue to see what was the matter.
The bedrail in fact was not broken, but the resident simply wanted someone to talk to. At
this point, I stayed and engaged in a light conversation with her. To the chagrin of the
other caregiver, I had overstepped my boundary. Once she came in, she said to me in a
brusque tone, “Is everything alright? Ok, I got this from here.” She then faced the
resident, turning her back to me without any more communication. A sense of
ownership also extended to controlling who could socialise and talk to a particular
resident’s visiting family member. I recalled one episode, where I spoke to a resident’s
son in the hallway while his mother’s caregiver was helping someone else in her section.
As soon as the caregiver saw her son and I talking, a look of anger appeared on her face.
When the son left, the caregiver told me that I should just mind my own business, and
not waste time socialising and abandoning my residents. This example shows clearly
that when caregivers get possessive over their residents, issues of territoriality become
intertwined with a sense of mutual belonging and identity. When I sidestepped my own
section in order to look after another resident, not only was I encroaching upon the
other caregiver’s space, I was also guilty of abandoning the residents in my own section.
Even though the other caregiver(s) did not say anything to this effect, I sensed that what
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