Why We Wrote a Guide to Elderly Care in Mauritius
At eleven at night, after a bad phone call with her mother in Mauritius, a woman in London searches for how to arrange care for an elderly parent.
The first result tells her to contact her local council to request a needs assessment. The second explains how Medicare Part A covers short-term skilled nursing. The third is a home safety checklist recommending she remove trip hazards from the carpets and fit a stairlift.
Her mother's house has tiled floors, no carpets, one storey, three concrete steps up from the garden, and no council anywhere in the world that will assess anything. That gap is why we wrote a guide to elderly care in Mauritius, and the gap is bigger and more practical than most people expect.
Good advice, written for somewhere else
There is excellent writing about ageing and home care in Britain, America and Australia. Much of it is careful, humane and better researched than anything we will produce for years. None of it was written for here, and the differences are not small ones.
There is no system to be referred into. British guidance is largely a map of how to get a public body to act: who assesses, what you are entitled to, how to appeal. In Mauritius there is a Basic Retirement Pension and a Carer's Allowance, and beyond that arranging care at home is something families organise themselves, privately, from a standing start.
The houses are different. Nearly every home safety guide written elsewhere concerns carpets, stairs and central heating. Here the real hazards are polished ceramic and granite tiles that become dangerous wet, moss on a shaded path, concrete steps up from a garden, gas cylinders in the kitchen and a mosquito coil burning near the bedding.
Cyclone season exists. Not one imported guide will tell you that an eighty year old living alone needs somebody named in advance to close the shutters, a torch rather than candles, stored water in containers light enough to lift, and a week of medication findable in the dark.
The family is often on three continents. More than 100,000 Mauritians live abroad. It is entirely ordinary here for the person paying for care, the person deciding about it and the person receiving it to be in three different countries. Foreign guidance treats caring from a distance as an unusual complication. For Mauritian families it is the default.
Nobody keeps a register you can check. In the UK you look up a provider on the regulator's website. Here there is no equivalent list to consult, which is why hiring is done on a neighbour's recommendation and why knowing what to ask matters far more.
Language and faith are not footnotes. Someone tired or confused falls back on the language they grew up with, which may be Creole rather than the English or French on their paperwork. And the person a family will want at a difficult moment is their own pandit, priest, imam or pastor, whose name should already be written down.
Her mother's house has tiled floors, no carpets, one storey, and no council anywhere in the world that will assess anything.
What we could not find anywhere
Before starting Homebird we spent a long time looking for a Mauritian version of all this, on the reasonable assumption that somebody must have written it. We could not find one. Not a bad one, not an old one. There was no single place where a family here could find out what home care involves, what it costs, how to choose someone, what the government offers, and what to do at two in the morning when something has gone wrong.
Some of that is because Mauritius has only recently needed it at scale. The share of the population aged sixty and over went from 12.7 per cent to 18.7 per cent between the 2011 and 2022 censuses, and families are smaller and more scattered than they were. The country has aged faster than the information available to it.
We had also just been through it twice ourselves, first with a father through two years of dementia and then with a mother after a broken hip, and both times we worked things out slowly and badly that somebody could simply have told us.
What the guide is
Fourteen parts, covering how to tell when a parent needs more support, the different kinds of care and what they actually involve, dementia and falls and coming home from hospital, making a house safer, medication and daily routines, the emotional side of it, how to share the work between siblings, how to choose a provider and what it costs, what the government provides, and a set of printable sheets a family can fill in by hand.
We are writing it chapter by chapter and publishing each part as it is finished, rather than waiting until all of it is done. When it is complete it will also be a single printable PDF you can keep, send to a sibling or hand to a doctor.
Three things we decided not to do
No email address, no form, no gate. Every chapter and every printable is free to read, download and pass on. A guide that asks for your details before it helps you is not really a guide.
No invented numbers. Where a figure exists and is official, we use it and say where it came from. Where it does not, we say so rather than borrowing a statistic from another country and hoping. There are several places in this guide where the honest answer is that nobody has counted, and we would rather write that than something tidier and untrue.
No frightening people into calling us. It would be easy to write all of this as a series of warnings. Most families arrive at this already worried enough, and fear is a poor basis for a decision about somebody's mother.
A guide that asks for your details before it helps you is not really a guide.
Who it is for, and who it is not for
It is for families in Mauritius, and for the ones organising this from the UK, France, Australia, Canada or South Africa. It is written for the person actually making the decisions rather than for professionals, which means no jargon and no assumed knowledge.
It is not a brochure. Homebird is a home care agency and we would obviously like you to call us, but nothing in the guide requires it. A good deal of it is about how to do this yourself, and one whole section is thirty questions to ask any provider before hiring them, which we would encourage you to use on us as well as on anyone else.
If it helps you look after your parent better without ever contacting us, that is a good outcome and the guide has done its job.
Talk to Homebird
Homebird is a professional in-home care agency serving families across Northern Mauritius. If there is something you cannot find an answer to, ask us and we will either answer it or find out. No obligation, no pressure.
WhatsApp or call: +230 5811 8335
Email: hello@homebird.mu
Care that feels like family.
This article is for general information and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Population figures are from the 2022 Population Census published by Statistics Mauritius.