The amount of informal and formal care among non‐demented and demented elderly persons—results from a Swedish population‐based study

Abstract

Informal care substitutes rather than compliments formal care and highlights the importance of future studies in order to truly estimate the amount of informal and formal care and the interaction between them. This knowledge will be of importance when planning the use of limited resources, and when supporting informal carers in their effort to care for their intimates.

Time use and costs of institutionalised elderly persons with or without dementia: results from the Nordanstig cohort in the Kungsholmen Project—a population based study in Sweden

“…Covariates were age, gender, comorbidity, and having informal care. The use of ordinary linear regression modelling was not suitable with the dependent variable, the amount of formal care, as it was not normally distributed and skewed with several of the values at zero or 24 and therefore Tobit analysis was used (Kmenta, 1986;Breen, 1996;Nordberg et al, 2005 The overhead and fixed costs includes administration, capital costs, technical support, operating costs for buildings, cleaning, and laundry (Drummond et al, 1997). Assumptions were made that overhead and fixed costs are included in the average hourly cost.…”

Incremental patterns in the amount of informal and formal care among non‐demented and demented elderly persons results from a 3‐year follow‐up population‐based study

“…The Kungsholmen-Nordanstig Project is a longitudinal population-based study on aging and dementia in Nordanstig, a rural area in the northern part of Hälsingland County with approximately 11 000 inhabitants, 330 km north of Stockholm (Nordberg et al, 2005). It is a part of the Kungsholmen Project, described elsewhere (Fratiglioni et al, 1992).…”

“…Even if there are great differences in how dementia care is organized worldwide (Kalaria et al, 2008), dementia care is to a great extent relying on informal carers (Prince, 2004). The impact of informal care in dementia has been highlighted in many studies describing the amount of informal care (Drummond et al, 1993;Clipp and Moore, 1995;Cavallo and Fattore, 1997;Albert et al, 1998;Langa et al, 2001;Moore et al, 2001;Artaso Irigoyen et al, 2002;samples, although there are some population-based studies (Nordberg et al, 2005). In clinical study populations, the patient and their caregivers are per definition known by the care system.…”

Determinants of home-based formal help in community-dwelling older people in Finland

“…Many elders rely on informal help from their social networks such as their spouse, children and their spouses, other relatives, friends and neighbors. The volume of informal help has been found to be much larger than formal help, for example, in the USA (Whitlatch and Noelker 1996;Davey et al 2005), in Great Britain (Davey and Patsios 1999) as well as in Scandinavian welfare states with strong publicly funded health-care systems (Hellström and Hallberg 2001;Larsson and Thorslund 2002;Nordberg et al 2005).…”