Older immigrants’ use of public home care and residential care

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the extent to which length of residence in the country and country of origin are of importance to older immigrants' use of long-term care services compared to native older people. The analyses were conducted on a population of over 65s living in the Municipality of Copenhagen on 1st Jan 2007. Information was drawn from the administrative registers of the Municipality of Copenhagen on the population's use in 2007 of home care and of residential care in a nursing home. These data were combined by Statistics Denmark with demographic data, socio-economic data and data on the use of health services. It was found that older immigrants are less likely than ethnic Danes to use municipal long-term care services when other predisposing, enabling and need factors are controlled for. The difference is greatest between ethnic Danes and immigrants from nonwestern countries who have only lived in Denmark for a few years. The difference decreases the longer the immigrant has lived in the country. The findings may be explained, at least in part, by poorer language skills and poorer knowledge of the Danish welfare system among older immigrants and the fact that they are more likely to be cared for by relatives than ethnic Danes are. However, in the course of time language skills improve and knowledge of the system increases and life style with respect to care may approach that of older Danes.

Ageing as a migrant: vulnerabilities, agency and policy implications

“…In addition, older migrants experience a lack of knowledge about public care accessibilities and availabilities, language barriers, different expectations and norms regarding types of help and treatment, and also adherence to strong family obligations. This fits with findings showing that migrants underuse public care (Bolzman et al 2004;Hansen 2014). Therefore, it appears that when in need of care, older migrants often prefer support from their children (de Valk and Schans 2008; Hansen 2014) to formal support.…”

“…Care is provided by different agents in a variety of settings: by the state or the market, in institutions as well as at home, or informally by regular/irregular migrants and relatives. The literature has generally shown how older migrants encounter difficulties when accessing formal services (Bolzman et al 2004;Denktas et al 2009;Hansen 2014) or hesitate to use them. This is due to several reasons.…”

“…Access to information on social services and public care is another example. Past studies show that older migrants might lack information and underuse this kind of services (Bolzman et al 2004;Hansen 2014). Contributions to this special issue show that this is not necessarily the case anymore.…”

Female Pakistani carers’ views on future formal and informal care for their older relatives in Norway

“…Furthermore, the strength of the association between migrant status and frailty has been found to be great, particularly among those from low-or middle-income countries [2]. These groups may also underuse public care services [3][4][5], and thus, the well-being of older immigrants can be largely dependent on their family carers. Informal/family carers are unpaid individuals, such as family members, friends and neighbours, who provide as much as 90% of the in-home long-term care required.…”

Transnational Aging

“…It is well-known that older migrants are family-oriented and prefer informal to formal care; their use of institutional and home care services is low compared to their native peers (Albertsson et al, 2004;Bolzman et al, 2004;Ebrahim, 1996;Hansen, 2013). This is also the case in the Netherlands (Denktaş, 2011;Gerritsen et al, 2006;Schellingerhout, 2004b), even though many forms of formal care are covered by their medical insurance.…”