Abstract
Current demographic trends in the UK include a fast-growing elderly population and dropping birth rates, and demand for social care among the aged is rising. The UK depends on informal social care—family members or friends providing care—for some 50% of care provision. However, lower birth rates and a greying population mean that care availability is becoming a significant problem, causing concern among policy-makers that substantial public investment in formal care will be required in decades to come. In this paper, we present an agent-based simulation of care provision in the UK, in which individual agents can decide to provide informal care, or pay for private care, for their loved ones. Agents base these decisions on factors including their own health, employment status, financial resources, relationship to the individual in need and geographical location. Results demonstrate that the model can produce similar patterns of care need and availability as are observed in the real world, despite the model containing minimal empirical data. We propose that our model better captures the complexities of social care provision than other methods, due to the socioeconomic details present and the use of kinship networks to distribute care among family members.
Highlights
In recent history, researchers and practitioners in public health have succeeded in significantly lengthening the human lifespan and increasing quality of life for the elderly
In the UK, the elderly consume the largest share of social care, and lower birth rates mean that the supply of available carers is decreasing over time even as demand is royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsos R
While the results presented here are still early, the outcomes of these simulation runs suggest that this model can produce broadly realistic portraits of the coming trends in UK social care
Summary
Researchers and practitioners in public health have succeeded in significantly lengthening the human lifespan and increasing quality of life for the elderly. As human lifespans continue to lengthen and birth rates drop throughout much of the developed world, many nations are experiencing an increase in demand for social care—the provision of personal and medical care for people in need of assistance due to age, disability or other factors. The 2017 Ipsos MORI report Unmet Need for Care showed that ‘more than half of those with care needs had an unmet need for at least some of their needs’ [4]. This means that less than half of those elderly individuals in need of assistance with ADLs were able to receive sufficient care. Large numbers of UK citizens are living without sufficient care; an estimated 1.2 million people did not receive sufficient care for their needs in 2017, an increase of 48% since 2010 [2]
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