New Educational itineraries and perspectives for care. The Innovative Caregivers’ Training model as example of strenghtening competences, networking and participation.

In associating the word education with “carer”, considering the related representations that it holds, we immediately fall in contradiction. The reason for this contradiction is located in the ambiguous state, both social and professional, of this role, that despite being a consolidate reality (EUROFAMCARE 2011) in some European countries (Switzerland, Italy), in terms of people that play the role and of services related to it, and last but not least, the services given to the citizens they care for, they can be considered as a hidden portion of welfare. There are various levels of ambiguity, the first one can be identified in the professional mandate that those people respond to (essentially women), which are formally hired for domestic-economy related duties, but that end up doing a purely healthcare job too, for which they are not trained at all and sometimes not even aware of. A second level of ambiguity, that generates the first one, is located in the contractual formula that sets their work, which, compared to the general regulations of the Swiss labor market (D’Angelo, Bignami, Kunz 2013), it’s quite lacunose concerning this category of people, since the actual job relationship is set directly with the hiring family, in fact in Ticino one is working to find solutions to this situation. This leads to a situation in which the quality of the working conditions is strongly dependent on the hiring family attitude, which often shows these characteristics: the carers live in the patient’s house, availability during 24 hours, even if during night they can sleep depending on the patient’s health conditions and requests, during the day at afternoon they have a 2 hours break (generally between 14.00 and 16.00), on Sunday they have a day off but without private spaces (regarding the dwelling) for their private life, the patients usually suffer from chronic degenerative polypathologies. These peculiarities summarize and effectively express the degree of precariousness from the professional side and the difficulties connected with it from the personal and social side, which often configure a state of isolation, from this point of view. Connected to previous emerges a third level of ambiguity, which refers to the relationship between "carer" and the family context where she works. The employer should generally be the direct patient of the carer, but the family members often play this role, sometimes because of the problems of health of the person that needs assistance. In some cases the assisted person is not an active part in the decision of being cared by someone, or is clearly against it, and reluctantly accepts the presence of a stranger in his house, somehow imposed by family members. Another aspect concerns the role of the family members that may, indeed, be employers for the "caretaker" but are also considered, especially by formal services, part of the patient’s care network. This creates a triangular situation full of potential conflict sources. A fourth level of ambiguity can be ascribed to the institutions, that don’t seem to be inclined to regulate clearly the position of these people, held back by the difficulty in dealing with a relatively new social phenomenon that don’t lends itself to classic solutions derivable from labor law. If you were for example to apply the rule of 8 daily working hours, every family would need three carers, that would make the costs for families hardly sustainable, this situation would need the involvement of the welfare state with consequent increases in social costs and related doubts about the appropriateness of similar solutions. The state tries quietly to avoid breaking a mechanism that has found its way to function in response to a need, ignoring the precarious conditions of "carers". Recently, just to try to respond in an structural way at these issues, started the project of training for "family collaborators", (involving several local educational institutions and the public authority ) that is definitely a decisive and concrete progress towards the professional qualification and the social and civic integration of these people. A first step has been taken will be to assess developments and impacts. Direct consequence of this is the carer’s social status ambiguity; they seem to be a community of people living in the social fabric’s interstices. From a juridical point of view they are stranger citizens, whose rights and duties are set by the law and are summed in their residence permit. But in fact, given their life conditions, they remember the figure of the Metic, whom in ancient Greece, was a stranger, sitting between non-free people and citizens. In conclusion, the carer job seems to be lived as a forced choice for own and family subsistence, apparently open to all but complex and difficult, incardinated in a twosome action/relation scene basically closed, with no recognition and self-realization, apparently low-specialized, exposed to risks of illegal hiring harassment and exploitation, related to the separation from the loved ones and from one’s own culture, lived almost like a suspended time.