Does someone in your family have diabetes or Alzheimer's disease? Has someone in your family had a stroke, or a heart attack and/or heart surgery? Do you have a child with autism, or do you have a teenager who has "mashed himself up" in a road accident?

Whatever the chronic health condition, someone is or will become that person's caregiver, whether a parent, spouse, partner or child.

Unfortunately, the problem is identifying oneself and others as a caregiver, so it is important to be very clear about what caregiving is and what caregiving is not.

Caregiving is the informal, unpaid, care that is given with love and dedication by family members when a chronic health condition is no longer manageable by the individual alone. This does not mean that it is for the faint of heart.

The levels of care that family caregivers provide on a daily, 365 24/7 basis range from providing meals and a home to full blown invalid care and all that that entails, including medical protocols that the average lay person could never imagine having to master such as tubes going in and tubes coming out.

Caregiving is not the paid work of direct-care workers or care-providers, in spite of the poor wording of many advertisements for caregiver/housekeepers. Anyone who is paid to provide care services is — or should be — protected by the Employment Act (2000) which allows for such benefits as limited hours of work, wages, vacations, and sick leave.

Direct-care workers, or care providers, or care workers, while under-valued and under-paid, are still protected by this piece of legislation. Family caregivers are not. I know I digress, but pity the poor soul who answers a recent advertisement in The Royal Gazette to be a caregiver/housekeeper to six — yes, six — families at the same time!

Presumably this advertisement is for families with children and, no doubt, at minimum wage. We need to identify the differences between a child minder and a housekeeper. We also need to respect the person who works as a carer for an invalid senior, and pay them accordingly.

Don't you think it is bizarre that we entrust our most precious possessions — our children and our dependent seniors — to people we value so little that we double and treble up on their workload? (I don't know the word for working for six families — can we say sextubling, as in having sextuplets?)

I was recently asked, "How does someone apply for a job as a caregiver?" The answer is no-one ever applies for the job of caregiver because none of us want to see our loved ones in the position of needing care.

We want our loved ones to remain healthy and independent and we certainly don't want to add caregiving to our already busy lives. The reality is that caregiving comes to us, we don't go looking for it.

Caregiving comes to us in two ways: rapidly as the result of an accident, stroke, or heart attack, or slowly as the impact of unmanaged diabetes, advanced ageing and the progression of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases take their toll.

Whatever the colour of the care balloon, at the end of the day the family caregiver is an unsung hero in our midst. Are you a caregiver? At what point do you recognise that what you are doing for your spouse, parent, partner or child is going way beyond the normal love, care and consideration that marks a healthy relationship or a healthy family?

The litmus test, if I can call it that, is the answer to this simple question: can the person you are 'helping' live independently with a chronic condition without your help? If the answer is no, then Yes, you are a caregiver. November is Family Caregivers Awareness Month in the US. In keeping with the American model, the Bermuda Council on Ageing is promoting November as Caregivers Awareness Month in Bermuda, and we are hosting the first Caregiver of the Year Award.

The winners will be announced in a Royal Gazette newspaper supplement on caregiving this Thursday, 6th November. Make sure you get a copy as our caregivers' stories make compelling reading.

Marian Sherratt is Executive Director, Bermuda Council on Ageing. She writes on issues concerning our ageing population each month in The Royal Gazette. Send email responses to info@bdaca.org.