User Perspectives in long term care and the role of informal carers.

This chapter has the goal of re-examining and expanding the results of previous analyses conducted within the INTERLINKS project from the perspectives of two groups of users of long-term care services: firstly, older people who are frequently faced with difficult decisions about how to reorganise their daily lives and obtain care because of declining health and functional abilities; secondly, their family, friends and neighbours who form a more or less an extended ‘social network’ of co-care providers, and who informally provide most of the required support, help and care. The chosen focus aims to examine the place of service users within a recent LTC policy development context that is characterised by an emphasis on the active-client paradigm and also by the discovery or rediscovery of the role played by informal carers. In this regard, LTC reforms over the past decades have not only often disregarded their major role as care providers, but also played down or ignored the differences and potential conflicts of interest between older people and their informal carers, who may have different or even conflicting, needs and expectations. Since the well-being of carers has an immediate impact on that of the older people they care for and vice versa, policies in the field of LTC and policies for informal carers must take into account these links and these contradictions. So the main goal of this chapter is to critically analyse the extent to which this new paradigm has been successful in achieving the reconciliation of the perspectives of older people in need of care and of informal carers.

NAIDITCH M.;  TRIANTAFILLOU J.;  DI SANTO P.;  CARRETERO GOMEZ Stephanie;  HIRSCH-DURRETT E.; 

2013-05-27

Palgrave Macmillan

JRC78824

978-1-137-03233-1,   

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC78824,