This extended blog is based on an opening address to the Northern Ireland Social Work and Social Care Research in Practice Conference,  given in Belfast on the 11^th March

There is a moment, when you stand close to a piece of old analogue equipment, and you hear not just the operation of the device but something subtler – a faint hum, a resonance. Engineers used to say that if you listened carefully enough, you could hear the “soul in the circuit.”

Today, in a world saturated with digital systems, artificial intelligence, and learning machines, we risk believing that everything valuable must be generated by computing power or captured in data. And yet – in the quiet spaces between calculation and connection – I believe there is something profoundly human still asking to be heard.

This talk is about that something.

It is about how we care, how we age, and how we hold one another in times of vulnerability. And increasingly, how we do all of this in a world shaped by circuits, algorithms, prediction, and artificial intelligence.

I want to start our journey in a place that may seem very far from social care – the world of global retail. Some time ago, I spent a day with organisations who live at the cutting edge of prediction, personalisation, and customer behaviour, from supermarkets to global online platforms. They spoke about the evolution of digital experience: how they have moved from simply observing consumer behaviour, to predicting it.

For over a decade, retail has been obsessed with personalisation. But we are moving beyond that. We are entering the era of agentic AI – systems that act autonomously on our behalf.

In the world of online shopping, AI now: searches, compares, validates, builds baskets, completes purchases, sometimes without the human ever asking directly.

These are systems acting on our behalf, in our interests, anticipating our needs before we articulate them.

The consumer is becoming the passenger rather than the active operator.

This is not science fiction rather this is commercial reality.

As foreign as that might sound to the world of social care, the truth is this: the individuals we support are consumers in that world. Their expectations have been shaped by it. The way technology anticipates their preferences, curates their choices, tailors their experience – all of this is already forming the baseline from which they enter our care homes, our home care services, our community supports.

But here is the essential difference: in retail, anticipating preference is about convenience. In care, anticipating need is about dignity, identity, risk, autonomy, and life itself.

So, when I began reflecting on these two worlds; the frictionless, hyper‑personalised world of retail, and the intimate, relational, unpredictable world of care, I realised that the comparison is not superficial. It is revealing. Because increasingly, both environments are shaped by the same forces. AI doesn’t stay in one sector; it moves with the human person.

And that brings me to the central question: As AI moves deeper into the world of care, how do we ensure it enhances the human soul, rather than replacing or diminishing it? How do we ensure there is always soul in the circuit?

Let me take you further into what I heard that day. The leaders of these companies explained that consumers no longer want endless choice. They want meaningful relevance. Not a flood of information, but a flow of respect. Not bombardment, but anticipation. Not intrusion but understanding. And they described how their AI systems build subtle psychological profiles, micro‑signals, timing rhythms, all in service of delivering something that feels personalised, responsive, almost relational.

So retail is shifting toward anticipatory systems: AI that predicts need before need is spoken.

When I heard that, I found myself thinking about the individuals in our care homes living with dementia, or people supported in their own homes managing layers of frailty, chronic illness, trauma, or loneliness. Imagine – what could anticipatory systems contribute? Devices that learn sleep disturbance before it spirals into crisis. Sensors that understand gait patterns and predict falls. Tools that identify subtle changes in mood, speech, mobility, or appetite that even the most attentive human might miss.

In a society like Scotland, where ageing demographics and workforce pressures collide, anticipatory care is not just desirable, rather it is essential. It has the potential to reduce crises, prevent unnecessary hospitalisation, and enable people to stay rooted in their homes, their communities, and their identities for longer.

But at what point does anticipation become paternalism? At what point does support become surveillance? At what point does helpfulness become a quiet erosion of autonomy?

That tension sits right at the centre of this talk.

In retail, there is a new term: the omniconsumer.

Retail is not only evolving personalisation; it is dissolving the idea of channels altogether. You are not a user of a platform – you are the platform. Everything flows around you. You become the pivot, the context, the centre point.

In social care we are – quite frankly – nowhere near that level of integration. Instead, we ask older citizens to navigate mazes of disconnected systems, assessments, criteria, budgets, professionals, and agencies. We ask people living with dementia to retell their story every few weeks to strangers. We ask families to do detective work simply to find out what support exists. And we act surprised when those living with complexity feel lost.

Yet the possibility exists – not for a consumerised model of care, but for an ecology of support shaped around the human being, not around institutions or service silos. A model where AI becomes the connective tissue holding information together, reducing friction, amplifying the contribution of the workforce, enabling continuity, and strengthening human connection.

Retail’s omniconsumer is simply a commercial metaphor for what we in care have known for generations:

A person’s life is not a set of disconnected episodes – it is a whole, living, relational story.

And AI allows us, perhaps for the first time, to coordinate care in a way that honours that wholeness.

But with this immense capability comes risk.

For older adults – especially those living with cognitive impairment -agentic AI could begin making decisions for them rather than with them.

We could see: erosion of autonomy, opaque decision-making, surveillance without consent, systems that infantilise rather than empower and a loss of the right to “be” rather than be managed.

And perhaps the greatest risk: that overstretched services begin to rely on AI as a substitute for human presence.

This is where the soul can be lost in the circuit.

None of the positives are inevitable. It requires ethical architecture. And for me, that ethical and human rights architecture has a name: PANEL – Participation, Accountability, Non‑discrimination, Empowerment, and Legality. PANEL is not a checklist; it is a philosophy of practice. It is how we keep soul in the circuit.

Participation means the older person, the individual receiving care, must shape the technology, not simply be shaped by it. Their stories, fears, rhythms, habits, hopes –  these must be the raw material from which AI is designed. People with dementia, with learning disabilities, with mental health conditions; they know what helps, what harms, what preserves dignity. They must be co‑creators.

Accountability means there must always be a human answerable for what AI does. AI cannot become an unchallengeable oracle. Decisions must be explainable. Systems must be transparent. No person receiving care should feel powerless in the face of automated judgement.

Non‑discrimination matters deeply because AI inherits the bias of the data it is trained on. And since most datasets are drawn from younger, healthier, more digitally active adults, older people risk being mis-classified, overlooked, or misunderstood. If we do not build inclusively, AI will magnify inequality.

Empowerment is perhaps the most profound. Technology must expand a person’s independence, not diminish it. It must help someone to live the life they want, not the life a system predicts for them. It must create capability, not dependency; confidence, not compliance.

And Legality is the foundation: rights must not lag behind innovation. The frameworks that uphold privacy, consent, autonomy and protection must evolve as quickly as the systems we deploy.

These principles are the spine of ethical care in an age of AI. They are the way we keep the compass steady. They are the way we ensure dignity does not become an afterthought. They are the way we weave humanity into technology, rather than allow technology to erase humanity.

And they matter because the workforce is exhausted. We have a crisis not of compassion but of capacity. People are leaving roles they love because they cannot sustain the burden. They are drowning in documentation, in regulation, in the administrative architecture of care. We ask them to be both sherpa and shield, guide and guardian, healer and administrator.

AI enters this space not because we wish to technologise care but because we wish to preserve it. Used well, AI can remove burden, free time, streamline tasks, amplify decision‑making, and allow carers to spend their time doing the one thing no device can ever replicate — being human. Holding a hand. Listening to fear. Sitting in silence. Bearing witness to a life.

That is not automation; that is liberation.

But we must also face another truth. Loneliness is epidemic. For many older adults, companion technologies, conversational agents, memory‑prompting devices, social robots are arriving as lifelines. We should not be afraid of this. Companionship technologies can stimulate connection, reduce anxiety, support sleep, and provide reassurance in long nights. But they must never become the substitute for human contact. They must be bridges, not walls. They must lead back to community, not away from it.

And this brings me to the heart of the matter.

The measure of success in AI in care is not efficiency. It is human connection.

If AI deepens relationship, strengthens autonomy, widens possibility, and restores dignity then it is ethical. If it replaces presence, narrows choice, or fragments relationship then it is not.

We stand at a moral threshold. Not simply a technological one. The question before us is: Who do we want to become? A society that manages ageing? Or a society that honours it? A sector that uses AI to compensate for scarcity? Or a sector that uses AI to create abundance? A world where human contact is optional? Or a world where technology frees us to be more present than ever?

The truth is simple: technology will be woven into the fabric of future care, into homes, behaviours, decisions, routines, conversations. But whether it diminishes or enhances the human experience is entirely up to us.

The soul is not in the machine.
The soul is in the intention.
The soul is in the relationship.
The soul is in the choice to design with dignity, to govern with humility, to innovate with compassion.

If we hold to PANEL, if we centre autonomy, if we prioritise presence, if we protect story, then we can weave the soul into every circuit. We can build a future defined not by what technology replaces, but by what it restores. Not by data, but by meaning. Not by scarcity, but by relationship.

And that, I believe, is our task. To ensure that as AI accelerates, humanity deepens. To ensure that as systems become more intelligent, we become more compassionate. To ensure that in every algorithm, every interface, every automated moment, the dignity of the human person remains paramount.

We have an opportunity, rare, profound, urgent, to build a future in which technology amplifies what makes us human, rather than eroding it. A future in which ageing is held with tenderness, decision‑making is honoured, vulnerability is protected, and care is celebrated as the heart of community.

Let us choose that future. Let us shape it together. Let us weave the soul into the circuit.

Thank you.

 

The following is based on a talk given to the Adult Support and Protection in Supported Settings conference (ASPIRE) a couple of weeks ago.

 Every morning, somewhere in Scotland, a hand is held out.

It may be on a tenement stairwell where the paint is peeling and the light is poor. It may be at a cottage door, wind pressing against the frame. It may be across a kitchen table where the kettle has boiled twice already, because the conversation has taken longer than expected. That hand belongs to a social worker, a district nurse, a support worker, a care professional of one kind or another.

It is not a hand extended to seize control.
It is a hand offered to steady.
To accompany.
To share risk.

This is where adult protection truly lives. Not first in statute or guidance, important though these are, but in these ordinary, human moments where voice and safety pull against one another, and where the task is not to choose between them, but to hold them together.

The tension we live with

Much of our public language still frames safeguarding as a contest: autonomy on one side, protection on the other. We talk as though we must sacrifice one to secure the other. Yet anyone who has practised in adult protection knows that this framing is false.

Safety achieved at the cost of voice is not safety. It is containment.
Autonomy asserted without regard to real harm is not freedom. It is abandonment.

The real work, the hard work, takes place in the space between.

It is there, in that narrow, uncomfortable space, that practitioners reason, hesitate, listen again, and sometimes carry the weight of decisions that will never feel entirely clean. This is not technical work alone. It is moral labour, undertaken daily and often invisibly.

Scotland’s adult protection framework is, in international terms, strong. The Adult Support and Protection (Scotland) Act 2007, the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000, and the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003 all encode a careful balance. They do not invite us to trade liberty for safety. They require us to secure safety through autonomy, participation and proportionality.

The principles are clear: benefit, least restriction, respect for wishes, supported decision‑making, review. PANEL- Participation, Accountability, Non‑discrimination, Empowerment and Legality- sits as a human rights model beneath this as a deceptively simple but profoundly demanding lens.

Yet law, on its own, does not do the work for us. It gives us scaffolding, not shelter.

Recent joint inspections of adult support and protection across Scotland have been honest about this. Multi‑agency working has improved. Commitment is evident. But variability remains, particularly in chronologies, in risk formulation, and in how consistently lived experience is captured and used to shape decisions. Where voice is poorly recorded, it is too easily overridden. Where proportionality is not clearly reasoned, restriction can quietly become routine rather than exceptional.

This is not about blaming practice. It is about recognising that rights‑based safeguarding requires constant attention. It is never finished. It must be renewed in every assessment, every case conference, every supervision conversation.

The quiet danger of urgency

One of the greatest threats to rights‑based practice is urgency.

Fear presses. Risk escalates. Time feels short. And in those moments, the temptation is to act quickly; to “do something” even if what is done narrows a life more than is truly necessary.

International human rights research repeatedly shows that when decision‑making collapses into speed alone, proportionality suffers. The most effective safeguard against unnecessary restriction is not abstract balancing, but disciplined insistence on the question: Is there a less restrictive way? Where that question is taken seriously, rights are more robustly protected and outcomes improve.

This is why proportionality is not a bureaucratic hurdle. It is an ethical brake.

To pause is not to neglect risk.
To slow down is not to be naïve.
Often, it is the most protective act available.

Beyond Scotland, the same tensions are being named with increasing clarity.

In 2024, the UN Independent Expert on the human rights of older persons, Claudia Mahler, published a major report on legal capacity and informed consent. It describes a global pattern in which consent in later life becomes procedural rather than meaningful; a nod, a signature, an acquiescence shaped by fatigue, pain or power imbalance. Capacity, too often, is assumed to be lost rather than actively supported.

The Expert’s message is disarmingly simple: presume capacity; support communication; treat consent as a process, not an event.

This resonates deeply with everyday practice. The unhurried cup of tea before the difficult conversation. The hearing aid battery replaced. The quieter room. The advocate who waits in silence until the person finds their words. These are not soft extras. They are the practical means by which autonomy is made real.

At the same time, something historic is unfolding. In April 2025, after fourteen years of evidence‑gathering and advocacy, the UN Human Rights Council established an intergovernmental working group to draft a legally binding convention on the rights of older persons. The conclusion was stark: existing international protections leave older people exposed to discrimination, abuse and the erosion of voice, particularly in health and care settings.

This is more than diplomacy. It is a signal, to governments, to inspectors, to practitioners, that age must never be treated as a proxy for incapacity, and that protection must never be used as cover for exclusion.

Even before a convention is finalised, its normative pull matters. Expectations shift. Scrutiny sharpens. What once passed unquestioned will increasingly require justification.

Most restrictions of liberty do not arrive dramatically. They arrive softly.

“She’s 89—she won’t manage.”
“He’d be safer if we just…”
“At her age, is it really worth…?”

Ageism rarely announces itself. It seeps into thresholds, hastens moves, narrows imagined futures. The UN’s work on older persons’ rights is explicit that these assumptions are not benign. They are discriminatory, and they materially increase the risk of harm rather than reduce it.

Safeguarding done badly shrinks a life.
Safeguarding done well creates the conditions in which life can still be lived.

The emotional cost of holding the balance

What is often missing from our systems is acknowledgement of the emotional labour involved in holding liberty and safety together.

To protect without overpowering.
To respect choice while living with uncertainty.
To know that whatever decision is taken, it will leave a residue.

This work demands professional courage. It asks practitioners to tolerate ambiguity, to justify restraint when necessary, and to step back when fear would rather tighten the grip. It also asks organisations and leaders to create cultures where thoughtfulness is protected, not penalised.

Holding the hand, not tightening the grip

What does this mean, practically, for adult protection?

It means treating advocacy as a default where decisions carry significant restriction, not as an optional add‑on.
It means writing chronologies that tell a causal story, not merely a timeline.
It means recording capacity as specific, supported and time‑bound, never as a fixed label.
It means making PANEL the structure of our conversations, not just our paperwork.

Above all, it means remaining present, especially when fear is loud.

In the end, adult protection is not about the subtraction of freedom. It is about companionship in risk. About walking with someone far enough that they remain themselves, and close enough that harm does not have the final word.

To hold liberty and safety in one hand is not easy. But it is the work.

And every morning, across Scotland, it is being done, quietly, imperfectly, thoughtfully, and with courage.

 

Donald Macaskill

 

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

February is a month of thresholds. The earth is still held in winter’s grip, but the light is unmistakably returning. Days stretch by minutes, a shy lengthening, and occasionally, on those rare, crystalline afternoons like the ones we had a couple of weeks ago, the sun breaks through and offers something almost startling: a moment of warmth in the cold.

As regular readers know I’m a sucker for an unusual word, especially old ones which have fallen out of use, and I came across one such just this past week.

Apricity means the warmth of the sun in winter.

It first appeared in the 1620s, likely derived from the Latin verb apricari, meaning “to bask in the sun.” The same Latin root also gives us apricus, meaning “sunny” or “warmed by the sun.” From this root, English formed apricity; a word that flickered into use for a century or two before fading into poetic obscurity.

In essence, apricity describes a gentle, unexpected gift: the way the sun can land on your skin in the cold months and momentarily transform a harsh landscape into something quietly hopeful. It is a word that wraps meteorology in emotion, suggesting not just temperature but soothing relief, renewal, and quiet joy.

It is hard to imagine a better metaphor for the work of social care and the people who deliver it. In a season defined by scarcity, strain, and austerity; in turn a financial winter, emotional winter, political winter – at such a time as we are currently enduring – carers bring warmth that feels improbable, generous, life‑altering.

In the world of social care, apricity appears not as meteorology but as presence.

It is the warmth of the support worker who arrives with humour in their voice despite a long shift.

It is the quiet companionship offered to someone who fears the night.

It is the patience needed to listen, to really listen, when the world moves too quickly for those who can no longer keep pace.

Apricity is found in the everyday: a hand steadying someone’s steps; a cup of tea made just the way they like it; the way a carer remembers their stories, their rhythms, their personhood.

All too sadly these acts do not melt the snows of bureaucracy, nor end the frostbite of underfunding. But they are transformative in their own small, glowing way.

Social care often functions in the coldest parts of society, in places of poverty, loneliness, fragility, and grief. Yet it generates warmth that radiates outward, shaping families, communities, and the national character.

Think of the elderly woman whose world has shrunk to the dimensions of her living room. To her, the home‑care worker is not merely support: they are sunlight breaking through cloud, a reminder that life is still capable of connection.

Or consider the young woman living with complex needs whose support team empower her to take her place in the world: to go to college, nurture friendships, have ambitions. Where once she felt invisible she is now seen.

These are acts of apricity.

They are the winter sun that coaxes life into movement again.

If February’s natural world is shifting toward renewal, perhaps our social care world can do the same. The warmth carers provide is real, but they are themselves often exposed to the cold: low pay, workforce shortages, burnout, and the emotional toll of always giving, always absorbing.

To honour apricity in social care is to ensure the carers themselves are warmed.

That means valuing the emotional labour built into every interaction; it means recognising care as a skilled, relational profession; it is furthered by ensuring fair conditions that allow carers the rest and renewal their work demand, and all of this requires re‑imagining social care not as a cost but as a public, moral, and cultural asset.

Apricity is a gift, but it cannot be taken for granted. Even the winter sun needs a clear sky.

As February slips toward March, the earth prepares for its thaw. The same is needed in Scotland’s approach to social care. The last few weeks following the Scottish Budget which was signed off on Wednesday last, have been bruising and hard and full of moments of a deep lack of awareness and appreciation for the organisations and workers who make up Scotland social care sector. After years of political frostiness; debates frozen between ideologies, reforms stuck in permafrost, perhaps now is the moment to welcome a change of season.

Carers have long been the apricity in our national winter.

It is time we became theirs.

Apricity does not pretend the cold is gone.

It simply reminds us that warmth is still possible.

In the landscape of social care, that is what carers do every day. They offer small, unwavering acts of humanity that break through the bleakness and remind us that even in the hardest months, care is a form of sunlight: steady, life‑giving, and quietly revolutionary.

As February creeps to its ends, let us celebrate the apricity they bring, and work toward building a Scotland where that warmth becomes not a rare winter gift, but the climate we all live in.

Winter Light

Late‑winter light drifts across the quiet ground,

a soft glow settling where the cold once held firm,

the kind of warmth that arrives without announcement,

a reminder that the world still holds gentle surprises.

 

Shadows loosen their grip as the day unfolds,

and a pale brightness gathers in the stillness;

unhurried, steady, mindful of its own return,

a quiet promise stitched into the turning hours.

 

In this moment, there is a pulse beneath everything,

a subtle sense of belonging rising from the calm,

teaching that even in the leanest seasons,

light finds a way to begin again.

 

And as the hours stretch their fingers into evening,

a softer truth becomes visible:

even in the coldest months, renewal begins quietly,

often unnoticed, but always moving forward.

So when the first true warmth settles on your skin,

gentle as a hand placed reassuringly on a shoulder,

may it bring with it the knowledge that nothing stays frozen forever;

that in time, light returns, hearts open, and the deep work of caring

for ourselves, for one another,

is quietly renewed.

 

Donald Macaskill

Photo by elizabeth on Unsplash

There are moments when language stops being a tool and becomes a refuge.

For me, Gaelic has always been like that. Not simply a language I inherited, but a way of being in the world, one that shaped how my family understood land, kinship, humour, grief and responsibility. It was there in the background of my childhood: half-heard phrases, songs that carried more feeling than explanation, a sense that words could hold people together even when life was hard.

In a previous blog now five years ago I spoke about how I had to be taught English to replace my mixture of twin-speak and Gaelic, of how I missed the cadences and rootedness of my original tongue, and of how my mother’s dementia was shaped by her return to the language of her childhood. I am mindful of all this in the year that the Gaelic language has received official status from the Scottish Government and two days out from the start of Seachdain na Gàidhlig (World Gaelic Week) which runs from 23^rd February to the 1^st March 2026. It is a Scotland wide and international celebration of Scottish Gaelic language and culture which is funded by Bòrd na Gàidhlig, with events in communities, schools, care settings, arts venues, and online. The theme for 2026 is: “Use It or Lose It / Cleachd i no caill i”

As I have grown older, that sense of language as belonging has deepened in me especially as I watched my own mother live with dementia. The sense of losing language unless it is used is also very pressing as every year without my mother’s Gaelic chats I grow further and further away.

Something remarkable happens as memory frays both with age and especially with dementia. The acquired, professional, socially expected layers of language often fall away first. What remains is older. Deeper. More elemental. For my mother, Gaelic had not disappeared in the way that names, dates or recent events sometimes did. Instead, it returned, even more dominant,  unexpectedly, tenderly, as if the mind, in its own wisdom, retreated to the place where language first felt safe.

This is not nostalgia. It is neurology, identity and care colliding.

During Seachdain na Gàidhlig, we rightly celebrate the living language, its creativity, its resilience, its future. But we also need to speak about its role at the end of life, and in the long, complex middle space of ageing, frailty and cognitive change. Because language is not just about communication. It is about recognition.

To be spoken to in your first language, especially when you are vulnerable, is to be told: you still belong here.

People living with dementia do not lose their personhood. But they do lose the scaffolding that helps them navigate a world built for speed, efficiency and cognitive performance. In those moments, language becomes more than semantics. It becomes emotional geography.

A familiar phrase can calm distress where medication cannot. A song can unlock connection when logic fails. A word spoken with the right rhythm and accent can say you are known in a way no care plan ever could.

This is as true for Gaelic speakers as it is for people whose first language is Urdu, Polish, Cantonese, BSL, Scots, or any other language carried into later life. Scotland is not monolingual in its ageing. Our care systems often behave as if it is.

Cianalas

There is a Gaelic word I keep circling back to as I get older: cianalas.
It is usually translated as homesickness, but the word is larger than that. Cianalas is the ache for what shaped you, the place, the people, the sounds, the blàs (the flavour, the accent) of speech that tells you you belong. It is a longing that is not simply for a geography, but for a known way of being.

In the gentle erosion that dementia brings, I have watched how cianalas moves from the edges of a life to its centre. My mother’s English, the language that carried so many of her adult years slipped away like a tide. But Gaelic did not go far. It returned in the mornings, in the intimacies of care, in the quiet between questions. A phrase. A hymn. The cadence of a blessing half‑remembered. And when a carer answers in kind, even with a few words, even with an approximation of the blàs, recognition sparks. The room settles. The person is seen.

This is not romanticism. It is what so many of us know from lived experience and professional practice: first languages often endure somewhere in the layered self, and when we meet someone in that language, we meet them in a place of safety and identity.

But what happens to language when the system and structures of social care become so pressured and stressed that just as in this past week we read of yet another Health and Care Partnership warning that care will potentially have to be reduced just to those with critical need?

For years, we have spoken about person‑centred care as a moral and professional baseline. But the reality across social care today is stark. Underfunding, workforce shortages and crisis commissioning have narrowed care down to task completion and risk management.

When the system is forced to focus only on what is “critical”, everything relational is framed as optional. A focus on language becomes a “nice to have”. Culture becomes an “extra”. Time becomes the enemy.

And yet, for someone living with dementia, language is not an extra. It is care.

A care plan that captures first language, familiar songs, place‑names; a team who learn basic greetings; signage and small rituals that carry the beul‑aithris (oral tradition) into daily life – these simple acts lowers anxiety, restores dignity, and anchors the self.

I have seen a single line of a psalm do more to soothe than any sedative; a remembered place‑name (An t‑Eilean, An Gleann) restore orientation more quickly than any timetable. These are not luxuries. They are expressions of dignity. But they are precisely the things most at risk when care is reduced to survival mode.

Gaelic carries concepts that modern care policy struggles to articulate. Ideas of belonging, mutual responsibility, and continuity between generations. Words that assume relationship rather than transaction. Care as something done with, not to.

When older people lose access to their language, they are not just losing words. They are losing a moral universe that once made sense of the world.

In a country that is ageing, diverse, and increasingly unequal, this should trouble us deeply.

If we allow the social care crisis to hollow out language, culture and relationship; if we accept a system that only meets “high‑level needs” while neglecting the human ones then we will end up with services that keep people alive but fail to help them live.

Seachdain na Gàidhlig reminds us that languages survive not because they are protected in law, but because they are used in daily life especially in moments of vulnerability.

I leave you with a poem:

Speak to me
not only so I understand,
but so I am recognised.

When my words come slowly,
meet me there.
When they come from another time,
do not correct them,
walk with them.

Care is not the task you finish,
but the person you remain with
when the task is done.

If we forget this,
we will build places
where bodies are kept safe
and selves are quietly lost.

Listen.
The language is still here.
It is asking
to be answered.

 

Donald Macaskill

Love is not a word you will find in most policy documents. It does not feature in strategic frameworks, regulatory standards, or workforce planning spreadsheets. It is too soft, too subjective, too human. It resists the tidy categorisation of outcomes or indicators.

Yet, walk into any care home, supported living service, or the home of someone receiving daily support, and you will find love everywhere. Not the commercialised romance that dominates 14th February each year, but the quieter, sturdier forms of love: presence, patience, kindness, fidelity, and regard. These are not sentimental extras. They are the hidden architecture on which good care depends.

We speak of care as if it were primarily a task, something to be delivered, commissioned, or purchased. We live in a time when so much of care is framed through metrics: minutes allocated, tasks completed, regulations checked. These things matter because they provide structure and accountability, but they do not reveal the soul of care. They cannot. Because the soul of care is relational. It lives in the space between people. It is the meeting of one human being with another at a point of need or vulnerability. And it is love, in its broadest and most elemental sense, that makes this meeting transformative rather than transactional.

To name love explicitly in this context is not sentimental. It is honest. It is professional. It is human.

Love appears in the way a carer notices the slight change in a resident’s breathing. In the way a support worker sits quietly with someone in the distressing confusion of dementia. In the way a team keeps vigil at the bedside of a person approaching the end of their life. In the way families entrust their mother, father, partner or child to the hands of strangers who, over time, become companions.

None of these fits easily on a procurement form.

In recent years, we have become braver in acknowledging that the emotional labour of social care is real labour; skilled, demanding, draining, and profoundly important. But we still hesitate to name love as part of that skill set. Perhaps we fear sentimentality. Perhaps we worry that invoking love will weaken the professional boundaries we have so carefully crafted. Or perhaps we are uneasy with the idea that a system so chronically underfunded depends on something as immeasurable as the human heart.

But naming love does not diminish professionalism; it deepens it. It reminds us that care is not simply a service but part of the moral fabric of society. Love is what roots dignity. It is what honours the personhood of individuals who may have lost speech, memory, mobility, or independence. Love refuses to reduce people to tasks, conditions, or risks. It insists that each person is deserving of attention, respect, and warmth.

I have long believed that the crisis in social care is not only a funding crisis, workforce crisis, or demographic crisis. It is also a crisis of imagination. We have forgotten that systems exist to serve human beings, and not the other way around. If love were recognised as a central component of care, we might design our structures differently. We might prioritise time over throughput. We might value continuity of relationship rather than the cheapest unit cost. We might reward the emotional intelligence required to soothe, reassure, and accompany.

Love, after all, is not free. It requires time, training, support, reflection, and fair pay. It requires leaders who understand the emotional ecosystems of their services. It requires political leaders courageous enough to speak not only of budgets and efficiencies, but of the ethical duty we owe one another.

Love is costly. It demands presence, patience, resilience, and vulnerability. It asks carers to carry the stories of others as gently as their own. It asks families to trust strangers who will become companions. It asks society to honour those at the margins, not with pity, but with regard.

And perhaps, if we are truly bold, it requires us to rethink what we consider to be success. A life well supported may not be measured in metrics, but in moments of connection: the smile that returns after days of silence; the shared memory that breaks through the fog of dementia; the comfort of being held, known, and not abandoned.

And when love is absent? We see loneliness deepen. We see distress unaddressed. We see people reduced to tasks and time slots. We see a system that may function on paper but fails in humanity.

This Valentine’s Day, while the world trades roses and declarations, it is worth pausing to honour the quieter forms of love that shape the everyday practice of care across Scotland. The love that is expressed in touch, tone, patience, and presence. The love that sustains people at their most fragile. The love that is given freely, but not without cost. The love that sustains social care in Scotland through long nights, under immense pressure, in moments of grief and in moments of joy.

Love may never appear in the formal architecture of our social care system. But without it, nothing holds. Love is not the soft centre of care. It is the structure. Love is the architecture.

As I reflect on the central argument of this piece; that love is the hidden architecture of care, I’m drawn again to the clarity of our poets. Naomi Mitchison, was a woman of fierce humanity and political tenderness, and in her work, she names love as a kind of ballast: a weight that keeps the world from spinning apart. Her steady, grounded lines feel perfectly at home in the landscape of care.

She understood that love and belonging are often expressed not in grand gestures, but in the small acts that hold people in relationship with one another. Her voice reminds us that care is built from these daily, patient continuities.

So it feels right to close with Mitchison’s poem,  a reminder that love does the quiet work of holding things together, in poetry as in care.

“Love Poem”

Naomi Mitchison

Love, like a stone at the rim of the world,
Holds the edge of things together;
It is the weight that keeps the sky from falling,
The stillness that steadies the weather.

Not loud, not sudden, not possessed,
But patient as the turning sea;
Love is the thing we build with daily,
And the thing that builds us, quietly.

Donald Macaskill.

Photo by Mayur Gala on Unsplash