Social support and long-term care

Overview

Social support and long-term care systems for frail older people are emerging areas of social innovation calling for social investment and new organisational responses. This research field aims at identifying the key, innovative factors that may transform ageing-related social support and long-term care into crucial drivers of sustainable socio-economic progress.

Quantitative and qualitative research provided an overview of good practice and policy initiatives that have shown potential for improvement. Regular exchange with relevant stakeholders was an additional source of feedback and information to construct future scenarios for ageing societies facing complex challenges to organise adequate social support and long-term care.

In particular, this research field provided the following products:

• An international state-of-the-art review on social support and long-term care.

• A quantitative analysis report on individual choices in social support and long-term care.

• A qualitative inventory on key drivers of change in delivering long-term care.

• A set of future scenarios of social support and long-term care.

The activities were co-ordinated by the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research (Austria) and carried out in cooperation with colleagues from Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal and Romania.

Findings for this research field

The Innovations section contains details of social innovations related to this research field. They were collected as part of an overarching task exploring the potential for social innovation to support active and healthy ageing undertaken as part of the ‘Active and healthy ageing as an asset’ research field.