Netherlands

Objective: The need for information about the disease and coping with the consequences, as well as on available care and welfare services, is frequently unmet in people with dementia and their carers. To provide carers of community-dwelling people with dementia with tailored information, the DEMentia-specific dynamic interactive social chart (DEM-DISC) was developed. The impact on the daily life of people with dementia and their carers, the user friendliness and usefulness of a first prototype of DEM-DISC was evaluated.

Against the backdrop of ongoing population ageing, informal care occupies an important place on European political agendas. This article discusses informal caregiving by middle aged and older persons in the Netherlands and other European countries, with particular emphasis on the role played by motives. The data are drawn from SHARE. Our results show that in the Netherlands, it is mainly feelings of being needed and obligation that increase the chance of informal care being given. Deriving pleasure from an activity, by contrast, reduces the likelihood.

The main focus of this paper is the development of an appropriate framework to characterize the process of long-term care utilization by the Dutch elderly. Three broad categories of care services are considered, namely, informal care, formal care at home, and institutional care. The use of these care alternatives is modelled jointly, and stochastic dependence is allowed between the various care options. Special attention is given to the concept of health status and to the potential endogeneity of this variable in the model.

This report presents results of projections of use and supply of long-term care for older persons in four countries representative of different long-term care systems: Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland. Using a standardised methodology, the projections show that between 2010 and 2060, the numbers of users of residential care, formal home care and informal care are projected to increase in all countries, but at different rates. The results also indicate that if current patterns of care use and supply prevail, supply of informal and formal care is likely to fall behind demand.

The opportunity costs associated with the provision of informal care are usually estimated based on the reduced potential of the caregiver to partake in paid work (both in terms of whether they are able to undertake paid work, and if so the hours of work undertaken). In addition to the hours of informal care provided, these opportunity costs are also likely determined by the necessity to perform particular informal care tasks at specific moments of the day. The literature, to date, has largely overlooked this dimension of informal care.

Community dwelling people with dementia and their informal carers experience a lot of problems. In the course of the disease process people with dementia become more dependent on others and professional help is often necessary. Many informal carers and people with dementia experience unmet needs with regard to information on the disease and on the available care and welfare offer, therefore they tend not to utilize the broad spectrum of available care and welfare services.

Because of the complex nature of the problems that carers of persons with dementia encounter, several comprehensive support programs for carers were developed in the past decade. One such program is the Meeting Centres Support Program (MCSP) that integrates different types of support for persons with dementia and their carers, which have proved to be effective in practice and/or research.