Workshop with DG Employment: Measuring long-term care: access, quality and sustainability

DATE

29/03/2019

The European Centre and ICF Mutual Learning Services are organising a series of five workshops about challenges and potential solutions in the area of long-term care (LTC) from an EU perspective.

The second workshop took place on 7 and 8 March 2019 and served to discuss the existing and possible comparative indicators to measure quality, access and sustainability of LTC. Ricardo Rodrigues wrote and presented the thematic background paper for this event.

Discussions focused on the diversity of definitions and thresholds to access LTC and related challenges for comparative research and assessment. Based on these caveats it also remains difficult to assess and measure the quality of LTC, which often leads to 'second best' solutions based on clinical indicators or structure indicators of quality. It was underlined that sustainability would need to be discussed not only from a fiscal perspective but with a strong focus on outcomes, other social costs such as inequalities and long-term consequences to informal care.