This book offers evidence and examples of useful experiences to help policy makers, providers and experts measure and improve the quality of long-term care services.

As ageing societies are pushing a growing number of frail old people into needing care, delivering quality long-term care services - care that is safe, effective, and responsive to needs - has become a priority for governments. Yet much still remains to be done to enhance evidence-based measurement and improvement of quality of long-term care services across EU and OECD countries. This book offers evidence and examples of useful experiences to help policy makers, providers and experts measure and improve the quality of long-term care services.

Since the early 1990s, long-term care policies have undergone significant transformations across OECD countries. In some countries these changes have responded to the introduction of major policy reforms while in others, significant transformations have come about through the accumulation of incremental policy changes. The book brings together evidence from over 15 years of care reform to examine changes in long-term care systems occurring in OECD countries. It discusses and compares key changes in national policies and examines the main successes and failures of recent reforms. Finally, it suggests possible policy strategies for the future in the sector. With contributions from a wide range of experts across EECD countries, this book is essential reading for academics, researchers and policy-makers in the field of long-term care policy.

Long-term care is an increasingly important issue in many contemporary welfare states around the globe given ageing populations. This ground-breaking book provides detailed case studies of 11 EU-member states’ welfare regimes within Europe to show how welfare states organize, structures and deliver long-term care and whether there is a social investment perspective in the delivery of long-term care. This perspective is important because the effect of demographic transitions is often used as an argument for the existence of economic pressure on welfare states and a need for either direct retrenchment or attempts to reduce welfare state spending. The book’s chapters will look specifically into how different welfare states have focussed on long-term care in recent years and what type of changes have taken place with regard to ageing populations and ambitions to curb increases in public sector spending in this area. They describe the development in long-term care for the elderly after the financial crisis and also discuss the boundaries between state and civil society in the different welfare states' approaches to the delivery of care.

This book is about caring for elderly persons in the 21th century. It shows that care has many facets and is influenced by many factors. Central topics of this book thus include the relation between the person depending on care and the care giver(s), the impacts of caregiving on the family and the larger social context, as well as socio-cultural and political aspects underlying the growing need for and the practice of formal and informal care. It is evident that care as a real-life phenomenon of our time needs the co-operation of multiple disciplines to better understand, describe, explain and modify phenomena of elder care. Such a need for cross- disciplinary research is even more urgent given the increasing population aging and the impending gaps between demand and supply of care. The present book is dedicated to this approach and provides a first substantive integration of knowledge from geropsychology, other gerosciences, and cultural psychologies by a multi-disciplinary cast of internationally renowned authors. Cultural psychology emerged as a valuable partner of the gerosciences by contributing essentially to a deeper understanding of the relevant issues. Reading of this book provides the reader—researcher or practitioner—with new insights of where the problems of advancing age take our caring tasks in our 21st century societies and it opens many new directions for further work in the field. Finally and above all, this book is also a strong plea for solidarity between generations in family and society in a rapidly changing globalized world.

Presenting extensive coverage of key theoretical and policy issues within the field of health care research, this forward-looking Research Handbook contends that students of health care need to take policy more seriously.

This book introduces readers to the world of ideal types within the readings of Max Weber by giving a theoretical understanding of ideal types, as well as applying the development of ideal types to an array of social policy arenas. The twenty-first century has seen the development of welfare regime analysis marked by two differing strands: real-typical welfare regime analyses and ideal-typical welfare regime analysis; the latter focusing on the formation, development and application of ideal types in general comparative social policy. Designed to provide new theoretical and practical frameworks, as well as updated in-depth developments of ideal-typical welfare regime theory, this book shows how Weber’s method of setting up and checking against ‘ideal types’ can be used in a wide variety of policy areas such as welfare state system comparison, comparative social and economic development, health policy, mental health policy, health care system analysis, gender policy, employment policy, education policy and so forth. The book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in the fields of social policy including health policy, public policy, political economy, sociology, social work, gender studies, social anthropology, and many more.

This book examines the large and growing human and financial cost of dementia and discusses policy options for improving care, controlling costs, and facilitating research.

The purpose of the book is to meet the WHO GPW output of 1.2.1 - Countries enabled to develop and implement equitable health financing strategies and reforms to sustain progress towards universal health coverage. It falls under the WKC research plan for sustainable financing under population ageing. The country studies and policy briefs will be continued in 2022-23, under the technical product of “sustainable financing in the context of population ageing.” The target audience is WHO member states and their supporting academic institutions and policymakers.

Sound health management and supportive policies helped Korea emerge swiftly from the pandemic. The recovery is set to continue as pandemic-era restrictions on contact-intensive services are shelved, despite the Russia-Ukraine war raising inflation and highlighting the need to increase supply chain resilience.