Concept of Care Poverty

Abstract

This chapter introduces the concept of care poverty and suggests it as a key approach for research and policy-making on care for older people. The concept combines and connects three different strands of research literature: gerontological studies that focus on functional limitations and unmet needs, feminist social policy scholarship that has introduced concepts like care regimes and care deficit, and research on poverty and social inequality. The chapter describes how the concept of care poverty is also inspired by Raiz’s term of health care poverty. Care poverty is defined as the deprivation of adequate coverage of care needs resulting from interplay between individual and societal factors. It is further described as a situation where people in need of care do not receive sufficient assistance from either informal or formal sources. The mission of the concept of care poverty is to help identify inequalities in access to adequate care and to contribute to the creation of policies that can eradicate these inequalities.