A Typology of Long-term Care Systems in Europe

This report summarizes the main results of Work Package 1 of the research project ‘Assessing Needs of Care in European Nations’ (ANCIEN). This report aims at contributing to knowledge on long-tem care (LTC) system design features by developing a typology of LTC system models in EU countries, which are characterized by diverse arrangements for the provision of care/organization and financing. Its approach deviates from existing typologies in a number of ways: It intends to produce a complete portrait of LTC systems without restricting its attention to selected settings, such as ‘nursing homes’, ‘residential care/assisted living’ or ‘home care’. Focus is confined to LTC services rather than covering a broader range of social services. It outlines a typology on the provision of care/organization and financing. This differs from existing work, which concentrates on comparing design features, such as financing alone, building up a system for developing countries or providing lessons for one national system in particular for the Netherlands and the UK. It provides a typology of existing systems rather than an overview of theoretically available possibilities. Unlike the typologies we know of, we also cover new EU member states for which sufficient data could be obtained to enable inclusion in a typology: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Finally, in deriving country clusters the report applies formal methods rather than pursuing a purely qualitative analysis. The limited availability of quantitative data, however, forced the authors to either restrict the number of variables and use more qualitative information, or reduce the number of countries to those with better availability of metric data. Therefore two approaches are presented, one for each kind of restriction. This quantitative approach again is in contrast to the existing typologies of known comprehensive LTC systems.