Exploring the Mobilities of Double-Duty Carers

The term 'double-duty carer' (DDC) refers to the primarily female healthcare workforce who provide unpaid care to family members or friends outside of work. DDCs experience many spatio-temporal tensions as they juggle both paid and unpaid care work across different care environments. Mobility is one of the key tensions, especially for DDCs who work in community home care provision. In providing care during COVID-19, DDCs have been increasingly vulnerable to a blurring of boundaries across care environments, and consequently experiencing poor health outcomes. Unpaid caring is globally known to be a women's health issue, resulting in women shouldering greater physical, social and emotional costs. COVID-19 has exacerbated these costs by increasing the care load, making it more difficult to access support, and continues to result in many DDCs reaching the point of burnout. Especially during COVID-19, it is in employers' best interests to support DDCs to help prevent outcomes such as poor work performance, absenteeism and employee turnover. This chapter uses a mixed-methods approach to answer two research questions: (1) Given the perspectives of DDCs, how has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted double-duty caring and DDC’s mobility of care?, and (2) What is needed to better support DDCs post-pandemic? This chapter contributes to the literature on the care economy and to the emerging literature on mobility of care.