Over the past year, the European Centre organised five international Seminars to launch and discuss the book A Research Agenda for Ageing and Social Policy, edited by Kai Leichsenring and Alexandre Sidorenko. To conclude this series, we wanted to examine the changing national and international contexts and potential next steps with authors and other stakeholders for research on ageing.
Teppo Kröger, Professor of Social and Public Policy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and Director of the Centre of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care (CoE AgeCare), presented his chapter as an example for future development of research in the area of long-term care. He was looking at shifts in the division of care responsibilities between the public sector and families that can be observed in many countries. Based on empirical data regarding the coverage of long-term care services and facilities, he highlighted diverging trends within OECD countries and argues that social policy research needs to be based on a systematic and longitudinal collection of reliable and comparable international data about who gets what, how benefits and services are distributed between different population groups and who is left without support.
Following this example, Alexandre Sidorenko and Kai Leichsenring briefly recalled the general framework and the rationale of the proposed topics for further research on ageing and social policy.
The discussion was then initiated by comments from Henk Nies, member of the Executive Board of Vilans, the Netherlands Centre of Expertise for Long-Term Care, and Professor of Organisation and Policy Development in Long-term Care at the Jo Visser Endowed Chair at the VU University of Amsterdam, and Nikolai Botev, affiliated Senior Advisor at the European Centre.
This International Seminar was moderated by Anette Scoppetta who led us through the following agenda:
16.30 Welcome and introduction
16.35 Long-term care system trends and knowledge gaps
16.55 Reconsidering the research agenda for ageing and social policy – where do we go?
17.10 Comments
17.30 Q&A / Discussion
18.00 End of meeting
The seminar is part of the series of international seminars organised by the European Centre.
