Abstract

Turkey is transitioning from an ageing to aged population at a fast pace. This process requires immediate policy and practice planning and actionable strategies. Formulating and implementing such policies needs to acknowledge parallel demographic and socio-economic changes to ensure adequate resources and appropriate services are developed to enhance the growing older population’s quality of life and wellbeing. Limited long-term care (LTC) provision, funding mechanisms and reliance on informal support primarily provided by women pose considerable challenges to all stakeholders, including the state, families and older people. This paper provides an evidence review on older people's status and their health and care needs, current LTC policies, provision and funding mechanisms in Turkey. It employs a mixed review methodology, making use of published statistics, indicators and literature. The study also adapts existing LTC funding estimation models to predict LTC cost for Turkey. The review highlights the increasing share of older people in Turkey, the fast pace of population ageing, and escalating health and LTC unmet needs. Older people are reported to have high levels of depression, loneliness and co-morbidity with regional, gender and educational differentials. The Turkish LTC and welfare models rely on the family, particularly women, in meeting increased demand. A hierarchical model with random intercept was implemented and estimated the LTC cost in Turkey to be 0.02% of GDP, acknowledging the high proportion of people at labour participation age range and low female employment levels.

Highlights

  • Oxford Institute for Population Ageing, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6PR, UK; Analytical Research Ltd., Surrey GU24 0ER, UK

  • We developed a search protocol with search terms to capture the population of interest and that (1) focused on older people or long-term care needs and (2) included long-term care provision or funding; the rapid review protocol is provided in S1 in Supplementary Materials

  • As we found out, removing this determinant resulted in a model with higher out-of-sample deviance

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Summary

Introduction

This paper provides an evidence review on older people's status and their health and care needs, current LTC policies, provision and funding mechanisms in Turkey. Population ageing in Turkey is manifested in the increased proportion of older individuals This is combined with a backdrop of earlier trends of high fertility rates resulting in large cohorts of people ageing at once [4]. Such phenomenon presents many policy and practice challenges, especially in countries traditionally not equipped to meet older people's aspirations, expectations and health and care needs [5,6]. In Turkey, and most countries in the region, the infrastructure and underpinning Long-Term Care (LTC)

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