Kirstein Rummery, University of Stirling

Ricardo Rodrigues, Lisbon School of Economics and Management, University of Lisbon

Long-term care is increasingly understood as a human right and included, for example, in the European Pillar of Social Rights. However, until now studies on whether these rights materialize have been rare. While aggregated indicators on expenditures on long-term care or volumes of services are useful, the key metric to assess whether long-term care systems are fulfilling the right to care is whether the support and care needs of the older and disabled population are being met. We argue that this should be the starting point for the analysis of care policies and that the focus of this examination needs to be on outcomes.

To this end, we propose a symposium that is partially based on book edited by Kröger, Rummery, Brimblecombe and Rodrigues, to be launched in early 2025, making the case for the new alternative term of care poverty. This stands for “inadequate coverage of care needs resulting from an interplay between individual and societal factors”. We aim to kick this research and policy discussion off on the international level, by presenting a series of manuscripts that discuss theoretical underpinnings, methods and empirical applications of care poverty. More specifically: Kirstein Rummery (University of Stirling, UK) will situate care poverty in the context of other care theories and the conflicts inherent in these theories; Ricardo Rodrigues (University of Lisbon, Portugal) will discuss some methodological possibilities to assess care poverty; Christine Kelly (University of Manitoba, Canada) will present results from a community-engaged mixed methods study of care poverty in Canada, in which she will share the process of community-engaged development of a care poverty framework; and Mari Aaltonen (Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland) will apply the concept of care poverty empirically by combining survey data and in-depth interviews of people with dementia and their informal carers in Finland.

Papers:

Care poverty and conflicts in social citizenship: the right to care? (Kirstein Rummery)

Methods to match a novel concept: approaches to measuring care poverty (Ricardo Rodrigues)

Care poverty: centering older and disabled people in the care economy (Christine Kelly)

People with dementia and their informal carers: at particular risk of care poverty (Mari Aaltonen)

Discussants:

TBC