DATA SYNTHESIS: Long-term care is not synonymous with nursing home care. It encompasses a variety of care environments that offer highquality yet less-expensive alternatives to traditional nursing homes and represents a wide array of services formats that differ in name and description among states and regions. Health improvements, increased attention to quality of life, and the need to reduce ...

This is one in a series of papers in the Retirement Security Project supported by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts.1 The Retirement Security Project is intended to bolster financial security for America's aging population by raising retirement savings and improving long-term care insurance products. It brings together pension researchers and health care experts to undertake nonpartisan re...

Universal access and generous coverage are important goals of the Dutch long-term care (LTC) system. It is a legal requirement that everyone eligible for LTC should be able to receive it. Institutional care (IC) made up for 90% of Dutch LTC spending. To investigate whether access to IC is as equitable as the Dutch government aspires, we explored practice variation in entitlements to IC across D...

Studies over the past decade show that some people are receiving more care than they need, and some are receiving less. Simple averages from a number of studies indicate that 50 percent of people received recommended preventive care; 70 percent, recommended acute care; 30 percent, contraindicated acute care; 60 percent, recommended chronic care; and 20 percent, contraindicated chronic care. The...

Previous research on the care-giver burden experienced by adult children has typically focused on the adult child and parent dyad. This study uses information on multiple informal care-givers and examines how characteristics of the informal care-giving network affect the adult child's care-giver burden. In 2007, 602 Dutch care-givers who were assisting their older parents reported on parental a...

This study examines the effectiveness of a communication skill training based on a coaching theory for public health nurses (PHNs) who are engaged in Japan's long-term care prevention program. The participants in this study included 112 PHNs and 266 service users who met with these PHNs in order to create a customized care plan within one month after the PHNs' training. The participants were di...

We study the effect of competition on quality in markets such as health care, long-term care and education, when providers choose both prices and quality in a setting of spatial competition. We offer a novel mechanism whereby competition leads to lower quality. This mechanism relies on two key assumptions, namely that the providers are motivated and riskaverse. Our proposed mechanism can help e...

A s the nat ion inches toward heal thcare reform, long-term care providers and others who care for the elderly are finding collaboration essential to con t inue serving their constituents. Although these collaborative arrangements may not be as well-integrated or comprehensive as the in tegra ted delivery network model proposed by the Catholic Health Association, they do represent a first s tep...