Long term care

Although the proportion of older people using home care services has significantly increased in East Asian countries, the issue of the relationships between older people and home care workers in the East Asian context has received scant attention from scholars. This exploratory qualitative study aims to explore these relationships under the new Korean long-term care insurance system. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 22 family carers and private-sector home care service providers (home care workers and provider managers).

Many long-term care systems in economically developed countries are reliant on informal care. However, in the context of population ageing, there are concerns about the future supply of informal care. This article reports on projections of informal care receipt by older people with disabilities from spouses and (adult) children to 2032 in England. The projections show that the proportions of older people with disabilities who have a child will fall by 2032 and that the extent of informal care in future may be lower than previously estimated.

A new initiative to support carers in the United States mirrors the national carers strategy in the UK. But there are important differences, such as the role of insurance in the provision of long term care. Looks at some recent research studies, in particular a study to understand how long-term care insurance for disabled older people can affect the lives of their working care givers.

Users, carers and the wider public are just as important to the real picture of long-term care provision and funding as local authority and NHS commissioners. So co-ordination is about more than agency structures.

This article is focused on children providing and financing long-term care for their elderly parent. The aim of this work is to highlight the interactions that may take place among siblings when deciding whether or not to become a caregiver. We look at families with two children using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe; our sample contains 314 dependent elderly and their 628 adult children. In order to identify the interactions between siblings, we have specified a two-person discrete game model.

One common myth about ethno-cultural minority family caregivers is that they do not use formal services. This study examined the intention of using home support and long-term care facilities by a random sample of 339 Chinese-Canadian family caregivers, using a modified version of the Andersen-Newman service utilization model. Filial piety, caregiving burden, care receivers, and health conditions are the common predictors identified.

This chapter explores the provision of care and considers possible future developments and the challenges around provision. We begin with a discussion of human resources, posing the question of whether the UK can satisfy the growing demand for carers, both informal and professional. We specifically examine the different types of carer: the self-carer, informal carers and professionals – social carers, nurses, and doctors, and the implications for health and social care policy and consider the implications for these carer roles in society.

In the first article of this new section, actuarial expert Robert Plumb looks in more depth at the topical issue of the future of long-term care.

This article suggests that the literature on care, which originally was heavily influenced by a gendered perspective, has now taken on other important variables. However, it is argued that if we look at the particular impact of the marketisation and privatisation of long-term care, we can see that gender is still a useful perspective on the production of care, especially paid care.