Care needs among aging individuals with functional or cognitive limitations pose a major challenge for societies worldwide. Rapid demographic shifts—marked by lower fertility and longer life expectancy—increase the demand for long-term care (LTC), decrease the availability of potential informal caregivers, and strain publicly funded LTC services. 

The Gateway LTC Policy Conference

To promote the evaluation of existing LTC policies and the involvement of the research community in future LTC policymaking, the Gateway to Global Aging Data project organized a LTC Policy Conference in November 2023, bringing together over 50 researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. The conference featured papers on U.S. and international LTC policies, as well as two panels. The first panel (pictured below) explored how research can inform LTC policy in evolving contexts, focusing on enhancing care service effectiveness, efficiency, and meeting care needs. The second panel discussed “Next Steps in LTC Research,” highlighting housing, palliative care, diverse care populations, and family caregiving as priority areas for advancing LTC research, policies, and programs.

Special Issue: Evaluating Long-Term Care Policies Around the World

Building on the research topics of the 2023 LTC conference, the Gateway team, in partnership with Health Economics, has developed and published a virtual special issue featuring eight peer-reviewed papers from the conference that examine LTC policies and their impact on aging populations. The scientific committee of the conference also prepared an introduction to this special issue, summarizing each article and briefly outlining the research question, conceptual framework, methodological approach and challenges, key findings, and implications for policy and future research.

The papers in this special issue address a wide range of topics, including informal caregiving, home-based care, LTC insurance systems, benefit eligibility, financing, and cost-sharing between beneficiaries and the public system. They also present empirical evaluations of existing LTC systems across multiple countries, providing evidence to inform policy development as nations respond to aging populations. Collectively, this special issue offers researchers and policymakers comparative analyses of LTC approaches across diverse institutional and international contexts. All articles are Open Access, ensuring wide dissemination to researchers and policymakers.

Articles in the special issue include: 

• The effect of parental health shocks on living arrangements and employment (Julien Bergeot, Irene Ferrari, Ya Gao) [Full article]

• The Hidden Value of Adult Informal Care in Europe (Joan Costa-Font, Cristina Vilaplana-Prieto) [Full article]

• Home-Based Care Outcomes: Does the Care Provider Matter? (Norma B. Coe, Chuxuan Sun, Courtney H. Van Houtven, Anirban Basu, R. Tamara Konetzka) [Full article]

• Mental health impacts of spousal caregiving intensity in the US (Jennifer A. Ailshire, Maria Casanova) [Full article]

• There Is No Place Like Home: The Impact of Public Home-Based Care on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Older People (Ludovico Carrino, Erica Reinhard, Mauricio Avendano) [Full article]

• Strategic Coding in the Assessment of Long-Term Care Needs: Evidence From France (Delphine Roy) [Full article]

• The impact of long-term care insurance on the utilization of inpatient service: Evidence and mechanisms in China (Xiao Han, Hanyang Wang, Xia Du) [Full article]

• Unpacking the care-related quality of life effect of England's publicly funded adult social care. A panel data analysis (Andrea Salas-Ortiz, Francesco Longo, Karl Claxton, James Lomas) [Full article]