Abstract
An aging population and rising life expectancy lead to an increased demand for social services to care for dependent users, among other factors. In Barcelona, home social care (HSC) services are a key agent in meeting this demand. However, demand is not evenly distributed among neighborhoods, and we hypothesized that this can be explained by the user’s social environment. In this work, we describe the user’s environment at a macroscopic level by the socioeconomic features of the neighborhood. This research aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the dependent user’s socioeconomic environment and service needs. We applied descriptive analytics techniques to explore possible patterns linking HSC demand and other features. These methods include principal components analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering. The main analysis was made from the obtained boxplots, after these techniques were applied. We found that economic and disability factors, through users’ mean net rent and degree of disability features, are related to the demand for home social care services. This relation is even clearer for the home-based social care services. These findings can be useful to distribute the services among areas by considering more features than the volume of users/population. Moreover, it can become helpful in future steps to develop a management tool to optimize HSC scheduling and staff assignment to improve the cost and quality of service. For future research, we believe that additional and more precise characteristics could provide deeper insights into HSC service demand.
Highlights
The growth in the number of people who are socially dependent in recent years can be partly explained by population aging and rising inequality [1,2,3], factors that are expected to continue to increase in the near future
Given the severity of this problem, studies on how social services agents can help to address this challenge have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years, during which time home social care (HSC) services have grown in relevance as personalized social services [5]
This increase in social dependence can be explained by the aging of the population, and by family structures that lead to more elderly people living alone [6,7]
Summary
The growth in the number of people who are socially dependent in recent years can be partly explained by population aging and rising inequality [1,2,3], factors that are expected to continue to increase in the near future. Given the severity of this problem, studies on how social services agents can help to address this challenge have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years, during which time home social care (HSC) services have grown in relevance as personalized social services [5]. This increase in social dependence can be explained by the aging of the population, and by family structures that lead to more elderly people living alone [6,7]. Other services such as telehealth can sustainably improve users’ wellbeing [11], but they can mostly be applied in cases
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