The protective features that families and wider social relationships can have are required to meet the demands of life in contemporary Western societies. Choice and detraditionalization, however; impede this source of solidarity. Family Group Conferencing (FGC) and other life-world led interventions have the potential to strengthen primary groups. This paper explores the need for such a social ...

Objectives Aging is pushing states to rethink long-term care policies in several dimensions. This study aims to characterize the reality of dependent older people regarding their demographic and health characteristics, to describe their informal carers and understand the availability of informal care. Methods A cross-sectional study was developed in Portugal in 2013. Descriptive statistical a...

The involvement of governments in the home care sector strongly varies across Europe. This study aims to explain the differences through the conditions for the involvement of informal care and governments in society; wealth and the demographic structure. As this study could combine qualitative data and quantitative data analyses, it could consider larger patterns than previous studies which wer...

BACKGROUND There has been a relative lack of research examing the distribution of care to elderly dependent people in Spain. The aim of this paper is to analyse how formal and informal care is provided to elderly dependent people in Spain and to assess the socio-economic conditions in which the different kinds of care emerge. METHODS This study is based on a sample of the elderly dependent po...

Older people have been identified as being at risk of social exclusion. However, despite the fact that care is commonly required in later life and the majority of that care is provided by informal carers, a connection between social exclusion and informal care-receipt has rarely been considered. The aim of this study was to examine how informal care-receipt is related to social exclusion. A fac...

Background: Out-of-pocket and informal payments are considered as 2 most important topics for equity in health care financing. Therfore, this study was conducted to systematically review and meta-analyze the status of these payments in Iran's health care system.    Methods: Required data were collected through searching the following key terms: "Unofficial", "Informal ...

This paper analyzes the impact of informal care by adult children on the use of long-term care among the elderly in Europe and the effect of the level of the parent's disability on this relationship. We focus on two types of formal home care that are the most likely to interact with informal care: paid domestic help and nursing care. Using recent European data emerging from the Survey on Health...

BACKGROUND To formulate sustainable long-term care policies, it is critical first to understand the relationship between informal care and formal care expenditure. The aim of this paper is to examine to what extent informal care reduces public expenditure on elderly care. METHODS Data from a geriatric rehabilitation program conducted in Finland (Age Study, n = 732) were used to estimate the a...

The services used by people with dementia and their carers weremeasured at three time points over 17 months. This analysis is unusual in that both informal care and formal inputs were costed. The costs estimates for informal inputs developed here may be applied to other data sets. Two hypotheses to explain the inter-relationship between informal and formal care inputs, substitution and suppleme...

The ageing of society is leading to significant reforms in long-term care policy and systems in many European countries. The cutbacks in professional care are increasing demand for informal care considerably, from both kin and non-kin. At the same time, demographic and societal developments such as changing family structures and later retirement may limit the supply of informal care. This raise...