Today-Oct 16
Companies in the home care industry said that there has been a growth in young freelance caregivers, an increasing number of whom are male. For Mr Tan Wee Han, the job matched his sense of purpose and fulfilment. He believes that with the wider availability of home care services these days, it is much easier to find home care professionals in a “very short amount of time”. Mr Asy’ari Asni said that the caregiving industry needs more men as “we have the physical strength to lift patients who are heavier”. Mr Tan Wee Han left his job as a captain in the Singapore Armed Forces, where he had worked for about 11 years, to become a freelance caregiver at Homage, a company that offers home care services, in December 2021. In fact, caregiving has “never left (his) life”, he said, because he was his mother’s main caregiver when she had a relapse of cancer while he was still in secondary school. He believes that with the wider availability of home care services these days, it is much easier to find home care professionals in a “very short amount of time”. There are no statistics on the total number of professional caregivers in Singapore, or a breakdown of their ages or gender types. But anecdotally, the number of young people freelancing in the home care industry is growing. A spokesperson for Caregiver Asia said the online portal for healthcare services saw a 20 per cent increase in freelancers and part-timers from 2020 to 2022, while declining to give exact figures. And more men are joining the industry “as gender-specific perceptions towards caregiving shift”, Homage added. This coincides with the fact that there has been an increase in the percentage of male nurses, according to annual releases by the Singapore Nursing Board. The latest available statistics show that in 2021, around 12 per cent of registered nurses were male, compared to 8.5 per cent in 2011. Read more at: https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/young-people-men-home-care-industry-2020156
