New Roles in Care for Elderly Patients in Cameroon: The Case of the Extended Setting of the Kumbo West Health District

Health problems of Cameroon’s 3.5% aging population hitherto attended to exclusively within formal health care settings are increasingly the object of care out of health facilities creating new roles for new types of care givers drawn from extended care settings. These are crucial for the extension of life in a context where the average life span has moved from slightly more than 50 to 61 years in 10 years. As more people are found within the 60 - 80 age bracket, they are faced with multiple biomedical problems associated with aging (musculoskeletal, sensory-motor, neurological, respiratory, vascular, cardio-vascular) that are attended to by the modern health care system which also offers some degree of nursing care. There is a also a growing need for complementary but critical care that is offered by kinship and social networks in the administration of medication and other health care, self-care, mobility tasks, household tasks, psycho-social support, advocacy and surrogacy. These pose problems of specific kinds for care givers where such activities are not structured and in the absence of a care services sector. This is the substance of an ethnographic study of caregiving activities in the extended caregiving setting of the Kumbo West Health District of Cameroon among elderly patients and their caregivers. The study showed that the burden of care devolves on younger generations of relations (children and dependents) and social support networks. While this has generated new forms of work and professions or a care industry elsewhere, in Cameroon, it has led to the emergence of new informal but critical social roles that are embedded in the indigenous structures of social support and local social capital with attendant complications and challenges, such that the support networks themselves need to be supported and integrated in the modern sector of care and social work.