Thinking through Time Poverty
With such an intense year for carers to be surveyed, I thought it would be interesting to review a small sliver of the Carers NSW National Survey and explore how my caring experience fits into these numbers.
Figure 16 - Social isolation/connectedness among carers (Carers NSW, 2020, pg. 36).
Table 15 - Social isolation/connectedness among selected demographics (Carers NSW, 2020, pg. 36).
Following along the theme of isolation from our COVID blog, these figures paint an unsurprising reality that a large majority of carers are socially isolated. For me these feelings of social isolation are exacerbated by time poverty and it was only in the past year that I understood what truly free time looks like.
Trying to organise respite services so that me and my mother could have some time for ourselves was incredibly hard and often ineffective. For years, I struggled to coordinate on my own. Finding it near impossible to manage support coordination and my own study and work commitments. My time poverty led to poor coordination of my brothers supports, severely impacting his access to the community. This inability to access services and supports was also reflected in our NDIS reviews. Where unutilised funds indicated a lack of need for said funds. Despite my continuous requests for support coordination, it felt that the unachieved plan goals were due to my poor time management. *
However, last year we received support coordination. The support coordinator had a dedicated responsibility to searching for services – following up email chains, coordinating respite, and expanding the possibilities of what we thought we could do. They helped us establish a stable routine that we could work towards, laying out the path for greater independence. In between the COVID spikes, we have managed to find ourselves support workers that were committed to working towards this routine with us.
Figure 10 - Quantity and quality of time out from the caring role (Carers NSW, 2020, pg. 29)
For the first time in over a decade –my mother and I had two days a week where we were not caring. Sixteen hours a week where we could block out time for ourselves, whether this was to take on more paid work or personal time to ourselves. The security of knowing that this was dedicated time to focus on ourselves was unbelievable. When you look at the figure below, these two days of support automatically place us in the upper quartile of carers. Simply having these two days of support from 9-5 had a profound impact.
Figure 11 - Hours per week to oneself (Carers NSW, 2020, pg. 30)
It is with these 16 dedicated hours to myself that I recognised that I had conflated a lack of ‘active’ caring with free time. I had previously defined my free time as the moments were my brother didn’t need anything from me, ignoring the fact that he needs someone with him at all times of the day.
Table 7 - Length of time main person being cared for can be left alone (Carers NSW, 2020, pg. 18)
I had realised that time poverty can also relate to an inability to use your spare time in the way you would like. The impact of this newfound time is subtle at first but I started to notice that I could stay back after work and build deeper connections with my colleagues, see my friends on a more frequent basis, and organise my own appointments without spending more time organising a one-off respite shifts.
It is these little moments that we can dedicate to our interests that help to improve our sense of belonging to the community and work against feelings of social isolation.
Read Carers NSW's expansive 'National Carers Survey' report.
*Note: That while time poverty was one of the barriers to accessing adequate support. Technical language required to request specific supports was difficult to navigate as a young carer.
