The Care Dividend
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.
Jonathan Cylus is the head of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies’ London Hubs and a Senior Health Economist in the WHO Barcelona Office for Health Systems Financing. His main research is on health systems, focusing primarily on health financing policy, health economics and health system performance, as well as on the economics of population ageing. He has worked on these topics in a wide range of countries, as well as with the European Commission, OECD and WHO.
George Wharton is Associate Professor (Education) of Health Policy in the Department of Health Policy at London School of Economics. He has consulted and written for national governments, international organisations, philanthropic foundations and industry bodies, and has authored articles on health systems and policies in the BMJ and The Lancet, among others. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the British Journal of Healthcare Management, and is a Board Trustee of the Paul Strickland Scanner Centre.
Ludovico Carrino is Senior Lecturer of Public Economics at the Department of Economics, Business, Mathematics and Statistics ‘Bruno de Finetti’ at the University of Trieste, as well as Visiting Professor at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London. He has authored books and articles in leading journals in the fields of Economics, Gerontology and Epidemiology, with particular focus on the economics of long-term care and Pensions, as well as on social determinants of health. He is currently leading the Trieste Unit for the NIA-funded Gateway to Global Aging Data project.
Stefania Ilinca is Technical Officer on long-term care with the WHO Regional Office for Europe, a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health and a Salzburg Global Seminar fellow. Her work focuses on innovation and service design in health and long-term care systems and on promoting equity in access to long-term care. Prior to joining WHO Europe, she has worked as a researcher and policy advisor at the European Centre for Social Welfare and Policy Research in Vienna and at Trinity College Dublin.
Manfred Huber joined WHO Regional Office for Europe in 2009, where he provided advice to Member States in Europe on the implementation of the Decade of Healthy Ageing, until his retirement in April 2023. His area of expertise is health and long-term care reform for healthy ageing; age-friendly environments and communities. He has authored several books on health and social services for ageing populations and has over 30 years of experience with international comparisons of health and social policy.
Sarah Louise Barber is the Director of the WHO Centre for Health Development (the Kobe Centre) in Kobe, Japan. Prior to working with WHO, she was managing evaluation research at the University of California Berkeley’s Institute of Business and Economic Research, and the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico. She has published widely on diverse topics in health economics and policy analysis, including the role of the private health care sector, conditional cash transfers, human resources, migration, and more.
Open access