Search results for ‘Subject term:"older people"’ Sort:
Results 1 - 3 of 3
Quality reforms in Danish home care – balancing between standardisation and individualisation
- Author:
- ROSTGAARD Tine
- Journal article citation:
- Health and Social Care in the Community, 20(3), May 2012, pp.247-254.
- Publisher:
- Wiley
As a consequence, reforms of Danish home care policy for older people have placed a strong emphasis on quality since the 1990s. Yet, despite relatively generous coverage of the over-65 population, Danish home help services receive regular criticism in the media and public opinion polls. This article examines this reform strategy which represents a shift from the welfare state modernisation programme of the 1980s, built mainly on economic strategies of cost-efficiency and New Public Management principles. Recent reforms have instead attempted to increase the overall quality of care by increasing the transparency at the political, administrative and user levels. However, reforms have revolved around the conflicting principles of standardisation and the individualisation of care provision. This approach has succeeded in increasing the political and administrative control over home help at the expense of the control by users, care workers and case managers. Implications for the future are discussed.
Central versus local service regulation: accounting for diverging old-age care developments in Sweden and Denmark, 1980–2000
- Author:
- RAUCH Dietmar
- Journal article citation:
- Social Policy and Administration, 42(3), June 2008, pp.267-287.
- Publisher:
- Wiley
In Sweden and Denmark, the development of old-age care has followed markedly divergent paths over the past 20 years. In both countries, the level of old-age care universalism was exceptionally high in the early 1980s. Since then it has dropped sharply in Sweden, while remaining constantly high in Denmark. These divergent trends are clearly irreconcilable with the common image of a coherent Scandinavian welfare state model, and they seem hard to explain with reference to traditional approaches of comparative social policy. This article attempts to account for the divergent developments by focusing on the balance of old-age care regulation between central and local government. The main finding is that only in Sweden has the central regulation of old-age care been weak and unspecific. As a consequence, Swedish municipalities have enjoyed sufficient autonomous, regulatory competence to exercise certain local retrenchment measures in times of austerity, thereby eventually causing a nationwide weakening of old-age care universalism. By contrast, municipalities in Denmark have been much more tightly bound by central state regulations which have prevented them from imposing similar retrenchment measures in the old-age care sector; consequently, Denmark's level of old-age care universalism has remained comparatively high.
Governing the coordination of care for older people: comparing care agreements in Denmark and Norway
- Authors:
- VABO Signy Irene, BURAU Viola
- Journal article citation:
- International Journal of Social Welfare, 28(1), 2019, pp.5-15.
- Publisher:
- Wiley
Increasing specialisation and demands to decrease the length of hospital stays have important consequences for the integration of specialised health and local care services. Based on case studies of care agreements in Denmark and Norway, this article compares subnational governance strategies for coordinating care services for older people discharged from hospitals. The question is how, and to what degree, national government regulations have an impact on local service coordination strategies. The analysis reveals that the numerous subnational procedures for coordination are somewhat more itemised in Denmark, and that regional variation in care agreements is greater in Norway. The identified differences can partly be accounted for by national differences in regulation, which is tighter in Denmark than in Norway. The study suggests that despite decentralisation of responsibility, subnational procedures to facilitate coordination are heavily influenced by national government policy. (Edited publisher abstract)