Influence of Contextual and Organisational Factors on Combining Informal and Formal Care for Older People. Slovenian Case

Abstract

The need and availability of informal carers are the most important determinants of care arrangements for older people requiring care. In the present study, we focus on the role of predisposing, enabling factors as well as need in predicting the distribution of care arrangements of social home care users in Slovenia. We not only included individual factors but also community factors and, even more importantly, we addressed the organisational factors which have an effect on formal care usage. In a case study in Slovenia we showed that, apart from need for and availability of an informal care network, which were the strongest predictors of care arrangements (no care, informal care only, formal care only, mixed care) across the activities of daily living, organisational factors such as the temporal availability of social home care and the number of users were the second most important predictors of care arrangements of social home care users. The implications for the conceptual framework for studying care arrangements within national studies as well as in cross-national studies are discussed.