The Uncaring side of Home Care Agencies
Devayani Sathyan writes about the home care staff neglected by their employers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sharada Devi* hails from a small village near the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border. Her younger daughter is eight months pregnant and is waiting for her mother to come fetch her from Coimbatore. Devi shows me a passport sized photograph of both her daughters and tears up while talking about the younger one. She was sent to my home five days ago by an agency that provides house helps and home nurses. She says that her husband has been calling her continuously and shouts at her for not being with their daughter.
It’s been four months since Devi saw her family. Devi is one among the several employees of agencies that recruit maids and home nurses who are often deceived by job profiles and treated as liabilities during the time of a pandemic.
For the past four years, my family has been hiring home nurses and house helps. For the first two years, a male home nurse and a female house help would be hired regularly. We only hired healthy and strong nurses who could hold Achan and help him to the chair and back to the bed. A year after Achan’s death, Grandpa fell ill. Grandpa was bed-ridden for six-months and around 15–20 different employees came and left; both house helps and home nurses. Grandma and Amma listed several reasons why this was happening.
Several of them were diabetic patients. Many of the nurses cannot sacrifice sleep at night and most of them do not understand patient care, which is an unfortunate irony. The question that arises at this point is whether these agencies that provide nurses and maids follow any recruitment criteria at all. The answer seems evident. The agencies simply do not indulge in training the recruits and don’t enquire about their personal health or well-being.
The pay per month (28 days) is around INR 16,000 for the house help and INR 17,000 for home nurses. Male Nurses get paid INR 18,500. Out of this, the agency gets 2500–3000 rupees as commission. Food and Stay expenses are borne by the family hiring the personnel. At the beginning, 1000 rupees is paid as registration fee and later when the agency sends the personnel, the full amount needs to be paid. In case they leave before serving the month, the agency will replace him/her with another person or return the money.
Male nurses who were hired to tend to Grandpa left within a week with the complaint that they were unable to sleep as Grandpa’s sleep cycle was a wreck. The nurses were often aged between 40–60 years and had ailments such as High Blood Pressure, Low Sugar Levels and Back Pain. They would collapse if they stayed awake for the night and would suffer back pain if they helped the patient from the bed. What makes it worse is that the nurses are forced to pretend as if they know it all even if they haven’t had any past experience with patient care.
The agency often hides the ailments of their employees from the hiring family and hides the requirements put forward by the hiring family from the employees as well. When the family blames the nurse/help for not meeting the demands placed, the nurse/help blames the family for having high expectations. It is a useless game of passing the buck.
The past three months have been testing times for the house helps as well as the families. Most of the home nurses and house helps had to continue in the same house and things turn ugly between the help and the family due to work from home and more family members at home, meaning added workload.
If profit making was the sole intention of the agencies before COVID-19, now , during a pandemic, it’s about neglecting the responsibilities towards the employee and the family that hired their services.
Agencies do not intend to arrange travel facilities for their employees as they will have to replace them with a different person. Most of the households are against bringing in a replacement due to corona scare. Worried by financial losses, the agencies cited lockdown as the reason for not being able to arrange for their employee’s conveyance back to their respective places. In the past few weeks we have been watching how the nation treats its migrant labourers. If we take a closer look, we are treating all kinds of labourers the same way. Be it the house helps, home nurse, construction workers and security guards; at the time of a pandemic their personal lives become invisible.
Devi left for her home today. Amma sent her to the agency’s office in an auto and she received a call from the agency confirming that Devi had reached there safely. She doesn’t know how to read Malayalam and the chances of her being sent to another home citing travel restrictions are high. We do not know for sure whether she reached her home or was able to see her daughter. Just like the lakhs of migrant labourer, her being only mattered when she was working for us.
*Name changed
Devayani is currently pursuing her Masters in Journalism and Mass Communication in EFLU. She enjoys teaching math to high school kids and is a great bathroom singer. Her writings are hugely inspired from the stories of people around her.
