Search results

The aim of this study was to address the unmet information needs of Malawian informal carers. We report on a three-year project which we co-created with informal carers, medical doctors and NGOs with the view to disseminate health advisory messages.

This study was developed on the principles of co-production. The impact of our health advisory messaging approach was assessed through observations and questionnaire-based surveys for quality, clarity and usefulness.

The messages were disseminated beyond the local support groups and reached a much wider community via word of mouth. The messages also led to short and medium term benefits for informal carers and their loved ones.

Our findings highlight the importance of understanding the contextual conditions of informal caring and that of co-producing interventions with the people these aim to benefit.

The undervaluing of care work, whether conducted informally or formally, has long been subject to debate. While much discussion, and indeed reform has centred on childcare, there is a growing need, particularly in countries with ageing populations, to examine how long-term care (LTC) work is valued. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the way in which employment policies (female labour market participation, retirement age, and precarious work) and social policies (care entitlements and benefits/leave for carers) affect both informal carers and formal care workers in a liberal welfare state with a rapidly ageing population.

Drawing the adult worker model the authors use the existing literature on ageing care and employment to examine the approach of a liberal welfare state to care work focusing on both supports for informal carers and job quality in the formal care sector.

The research suggests that employment policies advocating increased labour participation, delaying retirement and treating informal care as a form of welfare are at odds with LTC strategies which encourage informal care. Furthermore, the latter policy acts to devalue formal care roles in an economic sense and potentially discourages workers from entering the formal care sector.

To date research investigating the interplay between employment and LTC policies has focused on either informal or formal care workers. In combining both aspects, we view informal and formal care workers as complementary, interdependent agents in the care process. This underlines the need to develop social policy regarding care and employment which encompasses the needs of each group concurrently.

Local welfare governance is approached from the vantage point of informal carers caring for older people. A bottom‐up perspective is used to construct a critical view on welfare provision and governance practices at the local level. The paper aims to discuss the issues.

The data consist of 23 in‐depth interviews with informal carers. Universal access to services and equal treatment of citizens is discussed.

The analysis illustrates how informal carers share care responsibilities with the municipality and gain access to services both as service providers and service users. Informal care comprises a complex mixture of public and private responsibilities that poses a challenge to universalism. There are new inequalities emerging among informal carers, while access to public resources is easier for resource‐rich carers positioned as service providers. Resource‐poor carers identify themselves often as service users in relation to municipality.

The use of original data provides important knowledge on informal carers' dual position in the local welfare governance and contributes to both theoretical and empirical understanding on shifts within Nordic welfare governance. Informal carers' dual position reflects the essence of mixed governance and represents future social policies.

The comment addresses the idea of substituting professional elder care with informal care provided by early retirees to save economic costs.

The comment arose from reading “How to handle gerontocracy”, scientific research and critical, analytical thinking.

While having early pensioners deliver elderly care has positive implications, substituting professional with informal care must be challenged. First, the “unused reservoir” of early pensioners might be overestimated, as they often already have care responsibilities. Second, the substitution of professional services is already happening due to staff shortages. Third, untrained caregivers might struggle to provide the needed care quality, resulting in worse health outcomes (and higher follow-up costs). Finally, there are concerns of social sustainability: because of role expectations, mainly women may take on care tasks, reinforcing social inequality. Also, the third sector might lose hours of volunteer work.

The comment appeals to a critically rethinking of the idea of substituting professional services with informal care provision and argues for differentiated and well-tailored policy measures, taking into account the complex nature of (informal) caregiving.

This mixed-method study aims to contribute to the scholarly debate by outlining an individual-level theoretical framework for public value creation and evaluation that builds upon a social exchange perspective. It provides insights into the normative frames of primary stakeholders in the Dutch care at home sector, that is professionals, managers, clients and informal care providers.

A mixed-method design comprising a customized survey among 349 stakeholders, preceded by 31 in-depth interviews was used.

This empirical work shows differences and similarities in the stakeholders' normative frames revealed via three dimensions of expectations regarding the process of care delivery: personal contact, impact of rules and procedures and communication.

These differences in interpretation have implications for the measurement and evaluation of public value creation.

By statistically and methodologically exploring the different expectations' scales that are developed, we intend to work toward a measure for public value creation, which can be used in future empirical work.

In the context of a care crisis in Germany, care work done by volunteers is increasingly being semi-formalized by the state and used in professional care work contexts to relieve families and professionals. However, voluntary care has not yet been adequately studied from a care-specific perspective. This study examines in what way voluntary care can be considered decent care from a care-ethical and empirical perspective.

Considering findings of a qualitative interview study, the study examines the special features of voluntary care, addresses its socio-political expansion, and asks about the decency of voluntary care in elder care and social work.

Care work done by volunteers is a special kind of care work, which has advantages but also disadvantages regarding care-ethical requirements of decent care. The study examines under which conditions voluntary care violates these requirements and how this can be countered in socio-political terms.

Voluntary care is an under-researched phenomenon despite its increasing socio-political importance. While its state-led expansion can informalize and deprofessionalize care work at the expense of users, professionals, and volunteers, its analysis can help to illuminate the preconditions for decent care.

This paper aims to provide a response to the previously published paper on “Gerontocracy”.

This paper views care services through the lens of safeguarding, risks and responsibility in contradistinction from the largely economic and cost relevant argument put forward in the original paper.

This paper articulates the contribution of informal carers to integrated care solutions solely from an economic perspective overlooks the wider human and social dimensions of care provision in society.

Engaging in the wider debate about the status, contribution of informal carers to care solutions highlights the complexity of the carers' role in society which should evoke a more holistic debate of this important topic.

This paper aims to examine landlords’ health support systems to tenants to control COVID-19 in selected informal settlement rental housing (ISRH) in Ghana, dwelling on landlords’ views.

The paper used the concurrent imbedded mixed-methods approach and grounded the findings in the socio-ecological theory. The authors collected both qualitative and quantitative data from 242 landlords in 13 informal settlements across Ghana using quotas. The authors undertook semi-structured face-to-face and telephone interviews. The authors conducted content and thematic qualitative data analysis and used simple descriptive statistical data analysis.

The paper discovered that tenants had limited knowledge on the transmission of the pandemic, forcing landlords to regulate their building services usage, ventilation and thermal control, entertainment, common areas and rent advancement for tenants to control the pandemic. Also, tenants found it difficult to comply with the rules on ventilation for fear of criminal attacks, while high social connection and interaction among renters and inadequate enforcement caused the non-adherence by renters to social gathering. Again, landlords had difficulty in contract-tracing visitors suspected to be infected with the virus.

The use of concurrent and imbedded mixed methods to investigate landlords’ viewpoints on their support in health needs of their tenants to regulate COVID-19. The prescriptions from the study provide practical applications to formulate a mix of housing and health policies to formalize the support of landlords to their tenants in ISRH in Ghana.

This paper theoretically and empirically analyzes the effects of the elderly’s physical health status on their need for care and the choice of care models in China.

Empirically, the estimation results of a large-sample randomized intervention trial with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients through the difference-in-difference method indicated the following: (1) After the COPD intervention trial, the physical health status of the elderly in the treatment group improved significantly, the need for care was substantially reduced and the health improvement led to a 35.5% reduction in the probability of using elderly care. (2) The reduction in the need for care regarding the treatment group occurred mainly in social care. The probability of using social care decreased by 67.8% due to the elderly’s health improvement, while that of home care remained unchanged generally. (3) Further heterogeneity tests suggested that families with fewer potential internal resources for caregiving had a more pronounced decline in the need for social care.

Theoretically, these empirical results support the existence of the “pecking order” theory in the family’s choice of elderly care model, that is, families tend to employ all internal resources for caregiving before resorting to social care, resulting in a higher sensitivity of social care to health.

The main policy implication of this paper is that ex ante preventive health intervention policies can significantly alleviate the burden of care, especially social care, on families. And preventive health intervention policies are particularly effective in reducing the burden of the families with relatively few resources for informal internal care.

This paper critically reviews the motivations for introducing different connected healthcare to support Assisted Living in older and other vulnerable groups. The aim is to develop a new approach that will be sustainable in the future.

The methodology involves a consideration of assessment criteria currently being employed and the resulting costs and limitations in providing a person centred approach. The implications of introducing new technologies such as plesiocare and mCare are then considered.

It was found that one of the most cost‐effective applications of technology is in the support of informal carers but the telecare equipment that they are offered may not be the most appropriate.

The findings are limited by a lack of formal risk assessments that are person centred. The implications include the need for improved training in assessment processes and access to a wider inventory of technologies.

Existing telecare services will need to change in order to adopt more plesiocare and self‐care approaches and to engage more actively in the development of models based on mcare.

Governments and health ministries may achieve better and lower cost support for their ageing population by adopting a model that includes multiple layers of technology, including easier access to self‐care and mCare technologies.

This paper includes the first discussion on plesiocare and its relative advantages over telecare in supporting informal carers.