Unpaid informal carers: The ‘shadow’ workforce in health care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of the international literature on health human resources focuses on highly trained, regulated and visible professionals with exclusionary social closure in neo-Weberian terms, such as doctors and nurses. However, researchers and policy makers are now paying more attention to the increasingly important role played by less well-trained, often unregulated, and less visible occupations such as personal support workers. Beyond these categories of paid workers exists another mostly uncharted health human resource: unpaid, little trained, largely unregulated and invisible informal carers. They include the family, friends and neighbours who provide the bulk of everyday care required to support the well being and independence of growing numbers of people facing multiple chronic health and social needs in community settings. Focusing on Canada, this chapter documents the characteristics and contributions of informal carers, and highlights the challenging realities of informal caregiving – both from the perspective of carers and policy makers considering how best to support and encourage unpaid, informal carers without driving up formal health system costs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".