Thematic Panel 14

Care regimes and task division – comparative evidence    

Conveners:

Maša Filipovič Hrast, PhD, Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana and Andrej Srakar, PhD Associate Professor, Institute for Economic Research, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Discussants:

Andrea E. Schmidt,  PhD, Researcher, Research Affiliate, European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, Vienna, Austria and Valentina Hlebec, PhD, Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Demographic ageing has increased the pressure on public long-term care (LTC) systems and informal carers to deliver care to dependent older people. In European countries, we can expect a big increase in the need for care and a smaller number of potential informal carers. Consequently, care has become one of the important focal points of the organisation and restructuring of the welfare state.

In the proposed thematic panel, we would like to address the topic of comparative studies in LTC systems, focusing on the comparison of care regimes and/or comparison of countries within care regimes, looking in particular into what effect specific care regimes have for the task division between formal and informal carers. A large body of literature describes different models of task division between formal and informal caregivers but has mostly done so in the context of single country studies and there is little information how task division between formal and informal carers varies across countries and care regimes.

Apart from the needs and individual characteristics of older people, the social context of care determines the use of different types of care for older people. European countries differ considerably regarding the societal characteristics of care as well as in the proportions of people who receive various types of care.

In contrast with the case of health care, distributional fairness of LTC services in Europe has received limited attention. Given the increased relevance of LTC in the social policy agenda it is timely to evaluate the evidence on inequality and horizontal inequity in the use of LTC and specific forms of task division in this regard.

In our panel we will address the above issues in terms of comparison of European countries. In particular, articles relying on the analysis, based on data from SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe) survey, are welcome, but also all other submissions will be warmly desired.