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Room: Elissa Hall
Time: Fri 14:30 PM-15:45 PM

Long-Term Care for the Elderly: A European Perspective

Chair: Peter Makai

Session Description

Traditionally, research into long term care has been less intensive among health economists than research into health care. Several factors, among which the ageing of the European population, make it more and more important to study long term care for the elderly. It has been shown that the effect of ageing on health care use and costs is not as large as might be expected with a naive model, because of the influence of the costs of dying. For LTC this reassuring refinement does not appear to be that relevant. The use of LTC is linked to functional limitations that have to do more with the ageing process and less with proximity to death. The European Commission has commissioned three broad European studies into LTC within the 7th Framework Programme (FP7). These studies shed light on different aspects of long term care and are set up in such a way that they can complement each other. At the time of the ECHE 2010, the three studies have been running for about a year and a half, and the teams will be able to present the results of the first stage of their projects.

The Shelter project is based on the need for a common and standardised assessment tool for LTC that can be used in Europe to compare among European countries and with countries outside Europe. Shelter is a large cross-sectional, observational study of older people in nursing homes in eight countries. The nursing home residents in the study will be assessed using a specifically designed instrument (MDS-LTCF). Data about both structural and organisational characteristics of each nursing home will be collected. The information collected will contribute to the creation of a previously not available European database. So, the Shelter project has a large emphasis on instrument development and data collection at the microlevel of patients and nursing homes.

The orientation of ANCIEN is more epidemiological and economic. The objectives of ANCIEN are to review the LTC systems in EU member states, to assess the actual and future numbers of elderly care-dependent people in selected countries and to develop a methodology for comprehensive analysis of actual and future LTC needs and provisions across European countries, including the potential role of technology and policies on maintaining and improving quality. Performance indicators will be identified and relative performances of the different types of LTC systems assessed.

Interlinks is aimed at analysing the links between long term care and health care. The objective of Interlinks is to construct and validate a general model to describe and analyse long-term care (LTC) systems for older people from a European perspective. The particular aspects of the different emerging national models that currently address long- term care needs in Europe will be used to show how the links to health care services, the quality of LTC services, the incentives for prevention and rehabilitation, and the support for informal carers can be governed and financed to enhance structures, processes and outcomes of LTC systems.

Session Organizer: Esther Mot (ANCIEN consortium, Assessing Needs of Care in European Nations)

Presentations

1. Services and Health for Elderly in Long TERm care (SHELTER)

   Presenter: Giovanni Gambassi (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)

2. Classification of long term care systems

   Presenter: Esther Mot (CPB) and Markus Kraus (IHS)

3. INTERLINKS - Health systems and long-term care for older people in Europe – Modelling the INTERfaces and LINKS between prevention, rehabilitation, quality of services and informal care

   Presenter: Ricardo Rodrigues (European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research)