A Belfast woman who cares for her elderly mother has said she feels treated like “a workhorse” as new figures suggest that unpaid carers save Northern Ireland’s health service around £5.8bn a year, the equivalent of £16m every day.
Louise Vance (43) was 11-years-old when her mother suffered a brain haemorrhage in 1992.
It was the start of her caring journey lasting over 30 years, which escalated seriously in 2015 when her mother was diagnosed with chronic heart and lung conditions.
As well as memory loss issues, her mother is also vulnerable to infections which can quickly escalate.
“That’s the main issue with mum, because if they reach a dangerous level her body will be poisoned and she will die from that,” she told the Irish News.
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A care package does help some of her mother’s day-to-day needs, but Louise said the increasing responsibility takes its toll.
Earlier this year she said an infection left her mother struggling to eat, with medics suggesting a switch to pureed food which would require constant supervision from Louise.
Fearing she would lose all her freedom, she said a stressful three weeks “of agonising arguments and discussions” followed before a different plan was agreed.
“That was three weeks of hell where I didn’t know how my life was going to look or how I was going to cope in managing all these meals every day,” she said.
“It got to the point where I literally wanted to throw myself down the hospital stairs. I couldn’t see how I could sustain my life with what they were asking me to do.
“That’s the situation that carers can find themselves in. Suddenly things change massively and the social care system isn’t nuanced enough to deal with it.”
She added: “It is massively detrimental to my mental health. It got to the point where every time I got a call from a withheld number my heart would literally jump and would go into a full-on panic attack because I was so scared about what was going to be said to me.”
She has now called for health trusts to do more to ease pressure on carers.
“As carers, we walk into this because we love the people we look after and want them to have the best quality of life,” she said.
“We think we’re going to be supported and respected for that decision, but we’re not and until there’s a general change in mindset things aren’t going to change.”
As part of National Carers Day, research from Centre for Care states that the dependence on unpaid carers in Northern Ireland has increased by 42% over a decade - from £3.5bn in in 2011 to £5.8bn in 2021.
This was based on 2021 Census data on the number of people providing unpaid care against the cost for domiciliary care in each health trust between 2011 and 2020.
It means that if the going rate for domiciliary care was given to all unpaid carers, it would take up 80% of the Department of Health’s annual resource budget of £7.3bn.
Craig Harrison from Carers NI, who commissioned the research, said the figures laid bare “the extraordinary contribution” from unpaid carers every year.
“The system would completely fall apart without them, but the thanks they get in return too often falls way short of what they need to keep themselves well and enjoy even a basic quality of life,” he said.
“We need to get our priorities straight, restore the political institutions and begin dealing with the massive challenges facing Northern Ireland’s carer population.”