Abstract
The need and availability of informal carers are the most important determinants of care arrangements for older people requiring care. In the present study, we focus on the role of predisposing, enabling factors as well as need in predicting the distribution of care arrangements of social home care users in Slovenia. We not only included individual factors but also community factors and, even more importantly, we addressed the organisational factors which have an effect on formal care usage. In a case study in Slovenia we showed that, apart from need for and availability of an informal care network, which were the strongest predictors of care arrangements (no care, informal care only, formal care only, mixed care) across the activities of daily living, organisational factors such as the temporal availability of social home care and the number of users were the second most important predictors of care arrangements of social home care users. The implications for the conceptual framework for studying care arrangements within national studies as well as in cross-national studies are discussed.
Highlights
The need and availability of informal carers are the most important determinants of care arrangements for older people requiring care
The discussion on care arrangements has moved to the question of the division the labour between formal and informal carers, where e.g. the task-specific model (Litwak, 1985; Messeri, Silverstein, & Litwak, 1993) proposes that after formal care is introduced the informal caregivers share their tasks with formal carers
We focus on the role of predisposing, enabling factors as well as need for care arrangements in predicting the distribution of the care arrangements of social home care users in Slovenia
Summary
The need and availability of informal carers are the most important determinants of care arrangements for older people requiring care. In a case study in Slovenia we showed that, apart from need for and availability of an informal care network, which were the strongest predictors of care arrangements (no care, informal care only, formal care only, mixed care) across the activities of daily living, organisational factors such as the temporal availability of social home care and the number of users were the second most important predictors of care arrangements of social home care users. The supplementary model suggests that formal care primarily functions as care additional to that provided by informal caregivers, especially when needs increase and the informal network becomes insufficient (Chappel & Blanford, 1991; Denton, 1997; Edelman & Huges, 1990; Stoller & Pugliesi, 1991). In her study, Denton (1997) indicated that for a minority
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