The Care Dividend

As populations age, more people need long-term care services – how can we make the case for investing in long-term care?

Everyone has an older friend or relative who has needed long-term care and found a system woefully unprepared. In this book, experts from around the world consider the state of the art of long-term care systems and demonstrate why investing in long-term care is everyone's business.Long-term care often falls by the wayside in national policy dialogues. As populations age around the world and the prevalence of chronic conditions increases, greater numbers of people will need care and support, putting added pressures on acute-care facilities, communities, and families, among others. This increase in demand for long-term care raises questions about the capacity of governments to provide access to needed care, how these services will be properly resourced and who should receive these benefits. The Care Dividend provides a roadmap for investing in long-term care systems. It argues for increased public investment in high-quality, universally accessible long-term care and explains why these systems benefit everyone: households, health systems, economies, and societies. Bringing together a team of academics and policy experts from around the world, this book explains why and how governments can, and should, take action. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.