Long-term care systems and their pandemic preparedness: lessons from COVID-19

Margarita Estévez-Abe

Chapter 33 in Research Handbook on Social Care Policy, 2025, pp 529-542 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic affected older adults more severely. For this reason, the pandemic became a stress test of existing residential long-term care facilities (LTCFs). This chapter analyzes cross-national variations in mortality rates in LTCFs across wealthy democracies to: (i) identify the vulnerabilities of LTCFs revealed by the pandemic; and (ii) draw some lessons for the future. This chapter finds that countries with better oversight and accountability over the LTC sector experienced lower mortality rates in LTCFs. While existing taxonomies of LTC systems tend to focus on such dimensions, as private and public mix, the amount of public investment, and types of service delivery; the pandemic teaches us that social policy scholars need to pay greater attention to oversight and accountability issues. Across-national comparison of effectiveness of government oversight is a daunting task as it is not readily quantifiable. However, it raises worthwhile research questions for the future.

Keywords: COVID-19; Long-term Care; Nursing homes; Residential Long-term care; Government oversight; Mortality rates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781839103681
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781839103698.00045 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19597_33

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().