LIST OF PANELS

Ageing societies call for public policy response in (re)shaping national systems of long-term care (LTC) for older persons. Most of the care for older people was and still is provided informally, via family networks (Wittenberg, 2016). However, changing family structures, life styles and the worsening ratio of older people to working age population in many societies call for revision of available structures and networks to provide services for older members of society. Policy revisions are needed not only in countries with reliance on the care via informal networks but also in countries where LTC is formalized and relying on institutional provision: increasing demand for the care restricts possibilities of social security systems to respond to it adequately. Furthermore, as people live longer and are healthier, the demand not only for institutional care but also for care and services at home is rapidly increasing (Costa-Font et al., 2017). Growing interest from the private sector to provide LTC services provides a possibility to satisfy part of the increased demand (Marczak et al., 2015). However, the majority of the population might be restricted in possibility to use them due to financial constrains as income at retirement often is quite limited. Collaboration of public and private sectors in response to increasing demand of LTC services for older people might be efficient if special public policy measures are implemented enabling older people to buy services from the private market (Greve, 2017).

COVID-19 exposed the shortcomings of long-term care systems in many countries even more: even less home help was available via informal and formal networks to older people during the pandemic than before in most countries. Public confidence in institutional care (mostly nursing homes) was undermined also because of their inability to control the spread of the virus and increased morbidity and mortality rates in some of the institutions in comparison with that of same-aged residents at home. COVID-19 calls for a new look to the often overlooked and underfunded sector of LTC, shedding light to topics that the governments’ agendas have been reluctant to tackle: staff shortages, limited implementation of person-centred care models, poor integration of social care and healthcare responses, poor managerial skills at the top of many nursing homes. Some research attempts to explore the situation and provide recommendations have already been published (e.g. Boucher et al., 2020; D'Adamo et al., 2020; Gardner et al., 2020); however, further research is needed to inform policy making, especially on major emergent risks and challenges and success stories of measures taken to manage them from different national settings.

The main research question of this panel will be: what are the challenges of current LTC systems and what are the ways forward to respond to the increasing demand for long-term care for older people while securing quality of care and dignity of life.

Several hypothesis could be explored in relation to possible public policy directions: increasing scope of long-term care insurance, satisfaction of increasing demand for services and care at home via public-private partnerships, public policy measures aiming to support informal LTC care providers, etc.

Papers in this panel are expected to analyse different aspects of possible response to the increasing demand for long-term care (LTC) of older people. The papers can analyse efficiency and ability to respond to LTC demand within current national systems and new challenges raised by COVID-19, provide comparative analysis of possible solutions of the issues within different countries, present examples from other public policy areas that can be taken into account in search for solutions of satisfying rapidly increasing LTC demand. Papers can be conceptual or based on empirical research.