Ricerc@Sapienza

The project will focus on the relationships between Italian homebound elderly people, their family caregivers and the hired professional caretakers (when present) and how these changed following the current pandemic outbreak. I will analyze how COVID 19 disrupted daily routines and situations related to caring for homebound elders as well as how the pandemic affected the entwined lives of the stakeholders, taking into account financial, cultural and social status of each. Given the already strenuous situation families that must care for one or more disabled elders live in, we can postulate that the pandemic outbreak upset the delicate social and economic balances devised by caregivers and caretakers, often result of difficult previous negotiations. For family caregivers, who do not share a home with their relatives, former strategies of daily or weekly visits may not apply anymore, given the government lockdown measures and the extreme vulnerability of elderly people, seeing how they are especially affected by the virus. I will also, therefore, examine how being isolated from their families (and left with professional caretakers or in care homes) affected the elderly. On the other hand, I will try to consider how risk-taking behaviors from family members, regarding social distancing and lockdown measures, came into play out of concern and to avoid the insurgence of depression and other mental health issues in the older adults during the pandemic. On the subject of the relationship between family caregivers and professional caretakers, I will focus on cultural and economic struggles exacerbated during the pandemic crisis, trying to observe how families that relied on external help coped with being left without aid or, on the contrary, how foreign professionals caretakers that were let go, but could not return to their home countries, confronted the situation, especially since domestic aid for the elderly is usually provided accommodation for the duration of the job.