By Abiola Ayilara
I have handed many things to many people in my years as a nurse: medications, discharge instructions and, sometimes, hard news held as gently as I could.
But on July 26 in Lagos, I handed a room full of people something I had never given anyone before the first glimpse of my book, The Homecare Framework.
Writers will tell you that a book preview is exciting. They are right, but that is not the whole truth.
What I felt watching people turn those pages was closer to exposure.
This book carries 20 years of my life in it from my nursing training here in Nigeria, through the NHS and homecare settings where I worked across the United Kingdom, to the Nigerian homes I have served since returning to found my homecare business.
It carries the night shifts. The homes I entered as a nurse and left feeling almost like family. It also carries the failures of our healthcare system that I witnessed so often that they stopped shocking me.
That frightened me more than the failures themselves.
What moved me most that day was not the applause. It was the stories that came back to me.
After the formal session, people did not ask me questions about being an author. Instead, they told me their caregiver stories.
A man described bathing his father for two years and weeping in the bathroom afterwards not from disgust, but from the fear of doing it wrong.
A woman told me she still does not know whether her mother's final infection could have been detected earlier, and that the uncertainty has outlived the grief.
A young professional quietly asked me how one arranges proper care for a parent in Ibadan while working from a desk in Manchester.
Every story was different. Yet, in many ways, every story was the same.
The hospital ends at its gate. Beyond that gate, Nigerian families are often left improvising the care of the people they love most, with limited training, standards and support.
That is the silent crisis The Homecare Framework confronts.
Hearing people speak about these experiences in their own words confirmed why I spent years writing the book.
I wrote The Homecare Framework as a nurse who has lived inside the problem and as a health informaticist who refused to accept that the problem is unsolvable.
The technology I built coordinates care around vulnerable people at home, connecting families, trained caregivers and clinicians.
But the book argues for something bigger than any single tool.
It argues that care is infrastructure for everyday life, and that Nigeria must plan for it in much the same way it plans for roads and power with standards, training, coordination and policy.
Before the evening ended, I also spoke about what comes next.
Through The Purple Global Mission, the nonprofit I founded, we convene The Care Conference every two years. The next edition will hold in Lagos on November 18 and 19, 2026.
I told the room what I will tell you now: the book is my argument, but the conference is where that argument becomes a movement.
It will bring clinicians, policymakers, innovators and families together to consider what care in Nigeria should look like.
I left the venue that night with an empty display table and a full heart.
The Homecare Framework no longer belongs only to me.
It belongs to the man who bathed his father. It belongs to the woman who still wonders. It belongs to the daughter calling from Manchester. And it belongs to every family quietly carrying the responsibility of care alone.
The preview is over.
The work is just beginning.
I hope you will read the book, and I hope you will join me in Lagos in November.
The Homecare Framework by Abiola Ayilara is available for preorder. Follow The Purple Global Mission for details of The Care Conference, holding in Lagos on November 18 and 19, 2026.
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