Empowerment of parent carers is a fallacy when healthcare doesn’t listen (19 August 2024)

Summary

Rachel Wright, founder and director of Born at the Right Time, is a qualified nurse, wife of a GP and parent of a young man with complex disabilities. In this BMJ opinion piece, she describes her experience of navigating the healthcare system on behalf of her son, and highlights the gap between narratives about empowering parents and the reality of her experience as a parent carer. She describes the mistrust and institutionalised bias that the healthcare system shows parents and the impact this has on parents' mental health. She calls on the healthcare system to examine the causes of this bias, rather than focusing on empowering parents to deal with the problems the system presents as they advocate for their children.