Long-term care

This chapter provides a presentation and discussion of what long-term care actually is and how this might be defined, including whether one can measure quality in long-term care. It proceeds with a short description of the official extent of long-term care in selected European Union member states representing different welfare regimes. This includes Nordic, Liberal, Conservative and also Southern and Eastern European welfare states. The chapter discusses trends in long-term care–ranging from marketisation and the use of different types that can be interpreted as social investment, and focuses on welfare technology, rehabilitation and re-enablement. Long-term care systems in Europe are extremely fragmented and very diverse. This fragmentation implies a difficulty in presenting and systematising the variation in long-term care systems. Long-term care is of growing importance for welfare states as a consequence of people living longer and the informal care sector is under pressure as a consequence of more people in the labour market.