The future and care
Long-term care poses challenges for ageing societies.
UM – 06/2021
Europe's societies are getting older, which
means that people are frequently becoming more dependent on long-term care
services. Their needs are being met in very different ways: through the
coexistence of professional and informal care, at home or in a residential
facility, using benefits in kind, cash benefits or even combinations of both.
With advice and support
The EU wants to help its Member States
through providing information, developing indicators, making resources
available through the social fund and not least, by supporting those who
provide a high level of informal care. This will be accompanied through
monitoring via the European Semester.
Long-term care is a patchwork quilt
Member States in Europe find themselves in
very different positions when it comes to long-term care. The task of the
Social Protection Committee (SPC), an advisory body to EPSCO, and the EC's
Directorate-General for Social Affairs and Labour of pooling their findings was
accordingly challenging. The recently published Care Report 2021 provides a comprehensive analysis of the
common challenges in long-term care for older people as well as in-depth
studies of the situations in the specific countries, where long-term care is a
policy (for country reports, see here).
The report's recommendations are inevitably
varied and are as follows:
- collect comparable data about the access, coverage, needs and
provision of long-term care and develop appropriate indicators,
- improve the quality of care in terms of financing,
organisation, standards, technical support and, especially, the care workforce,
- ensure an adequate supply of care workers against a background
of difficult working conditions, low wages, high levels of informal care
and increasing mobility and migration and
- ensure sustainable financing. This is not the
case in many countries. Often not being a policy in its own right, long-term
care is organised at different levels and is financed from various sources. The
possibilities of prevention and technical progress should be exploited just for
this reason.
Further structural development is needed
Although reforms had been undertaken in
various Member States in recent years, they only ever targeted specific aspects
of the systems. A number of ad hoc measures were also implemented during the
pandemic. However, structural changes mainly failed to materialise.
Less care at zero cost
The authors of the 2021 Care Report also
point out that long-term care has a distinct gender dimension. Women dominate
the informal care sector, in particular. Unpaid care by mostly female family
members cannot be expected in the long term. Continued growth in female
participation in the labour markets will increase the pressure on expanding
professional care.