Perspectives // Ageing in Place
When Caregiving Becomes Coordination. The invisible work behind ageing at home
By DAVID STUART BATHE
Friday, 15th May 2026
Over the past two years, I've had countless conversations with caregivers, researchers and people working around ageing at home.
Many of those conversations began with practical questions about care.
Who is helping?
What support is available?
How can people remain safely in their own homes for longer?
Yet a different theme kept emerging.
Not care itself.
Coordination.
Again and again, people described challenges that had surprisingly little to do with care delivery and everything to do with communication, organisation and maintaining a shared understanding of what was happening.
What initially appeared to be a caregiving challenge increasingly looked like something else.
A coordination challenge.
Care has become a team activity
For much of modern history, caregiving was largely understood as practical support.
Helping with daily tasks.
Providing transport.
Managing medication.
Offering companionship.
These responsibilities remain important.
However, ageing at home increasingly involves multiple people working together around the same individual.
Family members.
Neighbours.
Friends.
Volunteers.
Professional services.
The result is that caregiving is no longer simply about providing support.
It is increasingly about coordinating support.
The Invisible Work
Many caregivers describe spending significant amounts of time sharing information, organising appointments, updating family members and maintaining oversight.
Who is attending the appointment?
Has anyone spoken to the doctor?
Who is visiting this weekend?
Has somebody followed up?
What has changed since last week?
None of these tasks are particularly difficult in isolation.
Together they can become a substantial burden.
Importantly, this work often remains invisible.
It rarely appears in service descriptions, policy discussions or official statistics.
Yet for many families it represents a growing part of the caregiving experience.
More People, More Complexity
As support networks expand, complexity tends to increase.
Different people often hold different pieces of information.
Responsibilities become distributed.
Communication becomes essential.
The challenge is not necessarily a lack of care.
The challenge is ensuring everyone understands what is happening.
When communication becomes fragmented, uncertainty grows.
When uncertainty grows, stress often follows.
Many of the difficulties families experience stem not from a lack of support, but from a lack of shared understanding.
Many of the difficulties families experience stem not from a lack of support, but from a lack of shared understanding.
A New Type Of Burden
One observation continues to stand out.
Many caregivers increasingly describe feeling less like carers and more like coordinators.
Not because they want to.
Because somebody has to maintain continuity.
Somebody has to connect the dots.
Somebody has to keep the picture together.
As populations age and more care takes place at home, this coordination burden may become one of the defining challenges facing families.
Looking Ahead
Public discussions about ageing at home frequently focus on services, staffing and capacity.
Important topics, all of them.
Yet there may be another question worth asking.
If caregiving increasingly depends upon groups of people working together, what support structures are needed to help those groups function effectively?
Because while support may be delivered by individuals, caregiving increasingly appears to be becoming a team activity.
About the author
David Bathe is founder of Passepå and ONEWORLD. Over the past two years he has been exploring how demographic change, ageing at home and increasing family responsibility are reshaping everyday life and caregiving.