“Behind every visit is a life, my life”: Listening to home care recipients through oral history
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Abstract
This article explores the lived experiences of older adults receiving domiciliary care in the London Borough of Bexley, UK, through a narrative oral history approach. Drawing on 26 in-depth interviews with individuals aged 55–102, the study highlights how care is understood, felt, and remembered by those at the receiving end of home-based support. Rather than treating care as a series of discrete tasks, participants framed it as a relational, emotional, and biographical encounter, shaped by memory, routine, loss, and the temporal rhythms of waiting and connection. Through richly textured accounts, the study demonstrates the profound impact of continuity, recognition, and emotional presence on the dignity and wellbeing of care recipients. It also reveals the fragility of trust when care is rushed, depersonalised, or poorly coordinated, particularly for those living alone or managing complex health needs. Participants described their homes not simply as sites of service delivery, but as spaces of identity, belonging, and contested autonomy, reshaped by the presence or absence of respectful, attuned care. Methodologically, the article advances oral history as a powerful and underused tool in ageing and social care research, illuminating experiential truths often missed by audit or survey-based methods. Empirically, it brings oral history into conversation with international literature on home care time, temporality, and emotion, showing how older service users themselves narrate the labour of waiting, relational work, and everyday negotiations of autonomy. The findings offer critical insights for care providers, commissioners, and policymakers, particularly in the context of integrated care reforms and the ethical imperatives of ageing in place. While grounded in a UK context, the study speaks to challenges facing ageing societies globally and offers transferable lessons on how relational, narrative-based approaches can inform more humane, person-centred home care models across diverse welfare systems. By placing the voices of seldom-heard care recipients at the centre, the article provides both a methodological contribution to oral history approaches in domiciliary care and an empirical contribution to understanding how older people experience “home care time,” continuity, and recognition.
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