title: Long-term care: common issues and unknowns.
abstract: All industrialized countries are grappling with a common problem—how to provide assistance of various kinds to their rapidly aging populations. The problem for countries searching for models of efficient and high-quality long-term care (LTC) policies is that fewer than a dozen countries have government-organized, formal LTC policies. Relatively new surveys focused on the elderly populations of about 25 countries could become the basis for research on which LTC policy design choices have desired outcomes for individuals and society and might be replicable in other countries. As in earlier decades when U.S. researchers created the Current Population Survey (CPS) modules and the Survey of Income and Program Participation to answer policy questions, researchers and policy analysts are now at a point where a concerted effort is needed to generate questions that international comparative research on LTC could answer as well as the data needed to address the questions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
authors.forename: Katherine
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Swartz
authors.forename: Naoko
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Miake
authors.forename: Nadine
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Farag
mesh_terms: D000203:Activities of Daily Living; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D017028:Caregivers / Q000639:trends; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003469:Culture; D019049:Developed Countries; D014943:Global Health; D019538:Health Care Surveys; D006291:Health Policy; D006299:Health Services for the Aged; D006801:Humans; D008134:Long-Term Care / Q000379:methods / Q000639:trends*; D010043:Outcome and Process Assessment, Health Care; D011057:Politics; D015397:Program Evaluation; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care; D012922:Social Change; D012941:Social Responsibility; D014481:United States