Long term care

Mark Ivory investigates current thinking among policy makers on the economics of providing more support to long-term carers.

The research reported here is concerned with the future of informal care over the next thirty years and the effect of changes in informal care on demand for formal services. The research draws on a PSSRU computer simulation model which has produced projections to 2031 for long-term care for England. The latest Government Actuary's Department (GAD) 1996-based marital status projections are used here. These projections yield unexpected results in that they indicate that more elderly people are likely to receive informal care than previously projected.

A study by the National Institute for Social Work suggests that estimates can be made about the length of time that a person with dementia will need community and long term care services. This can be done based on an assessment of the severity of dementia at the time of the community care assessment. The author highlights the need for an appraisal of local old age psychiatry services and eligibility criteria, and the importance of monitoring carers' ability and willingness to provide care.

Feminism rather than gerontology characterises this book but the substantive issues lie within the field of gerontology and the shift in the boundaries of paid and unpaid work at the end of the twentieth and in the early twenty-first centuries. Cash payments for care are a possible method of ensuring care and citizenship. The chapters raise issues of long-term care funding, the positions of users, caregivers and care workers in the care relationship, how care work could be professionalised and support for informal carers.

The European Commission (DG EMPL) invited tenders for a study of care provision within families and the socio-economic impact of family care-giving. The tender was won by a team of researchers from the Social Policy Research Unit, University of York, England and Vilans, the Dutch Expertise Centre on Long-Term Care.

Daughter caregivers of elders with dementia become their parents' advocates over time. This role takes on even greater importance when one or both parents are placed in a long-term care facility. This article presents the results of a qualitative study aimed at explaining how this advocacy role evolves following institutionalisation. In-depth interviews were conducted with daughters (N = 14) of an institutionalised parent with dementia and selected using a theoretical sampling procedure.

This study describes what types of service use barriers older adults' informal care-givers perceive and examines how these barriers differentiate care-giver service use patterns. Analysing the 2004 National Long-Term Care Survey and Informal Care-giver Data Set (N=1908) in the United States of America, this study reports the prevalence of service barriers for each type of service as well as for overall service use.

This paper investigates the prevalence of incapacity in performing daily activities and the associations between household composition and availability of family members and receipt of care among older adults with functioning problems in Spain, England and the United States of America (USA).