Care is an Ecology

I keep coming back to this phrase: Care is an ecology. Not because it sounds pretty, though it does have that faint smell of a conference brochure if we are not careful. I mean it in the most ordinary, practical, deeply human sense. Care is the field around a person....

The Care that Comes Too Late

There’s a strange moment when a person finally becomes visible to a system. Not visible as a neighbor or as someone trying to keep a life together. Rather, visible as a problem that now has a form, a referral, a discharge plan, a risk category, or a hospital...

When Care has Only One Doorway

I have been thinking about hospitals with a lot of tenderness lately, especially because the conversation so often begins with pressure, waiting lists, discharge delays, staff shortages, and that uneasy sense that the whole thing is being held together by caffeine,...