Elena Bogdanova, European University at St.Petersburg (EUSPb)
Tine Rostgaard, Roslkilde University

The COVID-19 pandemic took the long-term care systems around the world by surprise. Facing unknown virus, each country developed its own urgent and ad hoc measures of coping with the challenge. Some introduced strict quarantine measures, others avoided such restrictions. Overall, measures were mainly aimed at the nursing home sector, neglecting the home care sector, and measures often did not consider the effect for members of staff. The effect of COVID-19 on long-term care users and staff has varied by countries and may depended on different factors, including institutional features, cultures of care, integration of health and social care etc. Different countries entered the pandemic at different stages of evidence of how it spread, with different resources for coping with the infection, different cultural models of care, and relying upon different organizational modes of care provision. Therefore, the issue of successful resistance to the pandemic in a time pressure situation is an important empirical and theoretical question, which requires broad discussion, sensitive to a variety of circumstances. With this Thematic Panel, we invite single-country and comparative studies about COVID-19 policy responses and learnings from the long-term care sector.