Social Insecurity
There are some moments when everybody may feel invisible to the others. You might be too young in an environment where everybody is older than you. While they try to interact with each other, you might feel like an extra weight. Or vice versa, you are too old in an environment where all the youngsters are trying to hang out with each other, and you become invisible as you have never been young. Amongst knowledgeable people, amongst the people who speak only about football where it is not your strong suit, being new amongst the people who have known each other for a long time, etc. You see the picture, the example of social insecurity that everybody deals with his or her way.
The Homecare Services
However, in this text, I want to discuss another kind of invisibility that is not directly related to personal insecurity: the invisibility of a job description. More precisely, I mean the home care services in the healthcare system.
As a basic idea, if people continue to live an independent life in their own environment but need some support for that, home care services are the ones who are trying to support that will. This job may involve support for daily activities like dishwashing, preparing food, making bed, support with hygiene, etc., transport from bed to wheelchair or vise versa, support of some medical needs together with homecare health assistance, or support to palliative patients who prefer to spend their limited lifetime in their own environment – home, and so on. So, there is a wide activity range in the homecare services that I only wrote some examples of here.
General Functions in Homecare Services
As there is a rule that declares that one person can’t do it all, to be able to organize the structure, there are some functions and job descriptions under the homecare services. First, there should be a facility for all personnel, equipment, and vehicles as such, then a manager in the system who will manage his/her unit that is responsible for the services in a defined area. That person is called “chief” in the homecare system. Next, there will be some administrative personnel like care specialists, personnel for equipment, materials, vehicles, tools, etc., and cleaning personnel for the facility, next comes the planning personnel which will plan, all the daily visits per caretakers and field personnel, and at the bottom, there will be field personnel that realize the visits and apply the tasks. Of course, there will be other organizations that will be linked to this example unit by their functions, like washing, material supply, food supply, and medical units like home healthcare organizations, rehabilitation specialists, dietitians, social secretaries, and many others. You see the picture, there are many functions and job descriptions related to homecare services.
At this point, I would like to take your attention to the bottom job description, the field personnel.
Field Personnel in the Homecare
Field personnel is the most crowded category in homecare services and basically, they are the ones who realize the defined (and sometimes undefined) tasks for the caretakers. At a minimum, you need to be able to cycle or -depending on the place- drive a car to travel in between caretakers, to be able to communicate in the same language to be able to function in this community. Then you would take some additional courses from the home healthcare organizations for the delegation of medicine. In the next phase, one can take courses and become a care assistant or take a high school-level education and become an assistant nurse. A few assistant nurses may also take a course and become specialist assistant nurses, but at that stage, they would usually work as care specialists as such instead of plain field personnel.
Invisibility and Field Personnel
In the end, we came to the point of discussing invisibility and the field personnel. So where does the invisibility concept come from in our discussion? Well, normally I would begin this topic with a self-confidence topic as an introduction but this time, I will leave these personal issues to a side, and write about the others, especially the ones that support and influence this low self-confidence esteem.
Luckily, most healthcare personnel who work together with homecare field personnel are friendly, supportive, and helpful (this comment was collected from many field workers). They try to complete these field personnel with information and experience.
The problem begins when there is a healthcare personnel who doesn’t fit the description that I mentioned above, and only one of them is enough because everybody out of the field personnel is over-ranked.
“There are things that you don’t understand/know” This argument may come with implying, verbal, or a smile with an empty look. That much is enough to take the field personnel out of the picture. Questions like “Would you be so kind as to explain me” would work only if this statement is made with goodwill and an innocent attitude. The almost only exception for this argument is the limited time barrier.