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Breaking the mould: new trajectories in the domiciliary care of older people in Ireland
- Authors:
- DOYLE Martha, TIMONEN Virpi
- Journal article citation:
- International Journal of Social Welfare, 17(4), October 2008, pp.324-332.
- Publisher:
- Wiley
This article reviews the development of domiciliary care services for older people in Ireland over the last decade. It reveals three central developments, namely (i) the first steps, in the Irish context, towards a quasi-market; (ii) the introduction of cash-for-care and the subsequent notable segmentation of care tasks among three provider groups; and (iii) a rapidly increasing reliance on for-profit private home care providers. The authors conclude that while the Irish social care regime is still anchored in important ways in the primacy of informal (family) care and the subsidiarity principle, it has broken path-dependency by evolving towards an increasingly complex mix of public, not-for-profit and for-profit provision and financing. The most policy-relevant aspect of this new constellation is the lack of a regulatory framework that would enable the State to monitor the multiple and diverse providers with the view to ensuring the quality of home care services.
Expanded, but not regulated: ambiguity in home-care policy in Ireland
- Authors:
- TIMONEN Virpi, DOYLE Martha, O’DWYER Ciara
- Journal article citation:
- Health and Social Care in the Community, 20(3), May 2012, pp.310-318.
- Publisher:
- Wiley
The article examines this incompatibility between the expansion of home-care services in Ireland, and the failure to develop policies to govern access to and quality of services. It suggests that the key factors that motivated home-care expansion in the Irish case were: problems in the acute hospital sector and the perception of home care as a partial solution to these; and significant GDP growth that provided politicians with the means to fund expansion in home-care services. The key factors that inhibited the development of a policy framework to govern home-care services were: weak governance structures in health services and decision-making at national level based on short-term political gain; Ireland’s adherence to the liberal welfare state model and concern about uncontrollable care costs in the face of population ageing; until 2010, paucity of attention to home-care issues in the Irish media; and weak provider interest representation.
Early-life circumstances and later-life loneliness in Ireland
- Authors:
- KAMIYA Yumiko, DOYLE Martha, TIMONEN Virpi
- Journal article citation:
- Gerontologist, 54(5), 2014, pp.773-783.
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
Purpose of the Study: This article examines the impact of early- and later-life circumstances on loneliness among people aged 65+ in Ireland. Design and Methods: Data are from the first wave of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, a nationally representative sample of community-dwelling adults aged 50+. The participants (N = 2,645) aged 65+ were included in the analysis. Because of the large number of never married persons in the older Irish population, the authors first used a multinomial logistic model to examine which childhood circumstances are associated with current marital status. The authors then estimated multiple regression models for loneliness, in stages conforming to the life course, to examine the extent to which early events are mediated by later events. Results: Poor childhood socioeconomic status (for men and women) and parental substance abuse (for men) have direct effects on loneliness at older ages. Implications: The results indicate the significance of the childhood environment for understanding loneliness in later life. Future research should examine possible pathways not currently measured that may be responsible for the association of early environment and later-life loneliness and explore the links between childhood and other measures of well-being in old age. The relationship of childhood socioeconomic deprivation and parental substance abuse with adult well-being should be an important consideration in social policy planning. (Edited publisher abstract)