Health Status, Functional Limitations and Disability: Changes in Poland

The social changes in Poland over the last two decades have had an impact on many dimensions of life, including on important elements of human capital, such as health and functional and instrumental daily activities. This article contains an overview of the available data and indicators on health status, morbidity and disability. It presents the changes in the level of functional and legal disability and aims to show the reasons for these trends. Functional disability is highlighted as one of the major challenges for social and health policy in the next few decades in the context of dynamic aging

The System of Long-Term Care in Poland

In the field of social protection, Poland belongs to the EU group of countries with the familybased welfare model, what is extremely visible for the long-term care where family is the main care provider for elderly individuals with limitations in activities of daily living. At the same time the proportion of elderly in the coming decades is projected to be among the highest in the European Union, what raises questions on the design of the long-term care. For the moment the system is highly unregulated and disintegrated between social assistance and health care services. But it is the health sector that concentrates policy debate with a proposal of an introduction of nursing insurance. In the social sector, the significant changes that were favorable to LTC services development were introduced by the law on the social assistance (2004) and family benefits (2003) widening the scope of care available at home and in adult day care centers. But still provision of services is insufficient and a market of private services, paid out-of-pocket rapidly develops. It seems that main problems of the long-term care development in the future will be raising demand against insufficient resources and diversified priorities of the health care system

Scenarios for Health Expenditure in Poland

The report is a result of the Ageing, Health Status and Determinants of Health Expenditure (AHEAD) project within the EC 6th Framework programme. The objective of the research was to present the model of future health care system revenues and expenditures in Poland and to discuss projection assumptions and results. The projections are based on methodology adopted in the International Labour Organization (ILO) Social Budget model. The projection examines impact of demographic changes and changes in health status on future (up to 2050) health expenditures. Next to it, future changes in the labour market participation and their impact on the health care system revenues are examined. Impact of demography on the health care system financial balanced is examined in four different scenarios: baseline scenario, death-related costs scenario, different longevity scenario and diversified employment rates scenario. Results indicate dynamic and systematic increase of the health expenditures in the next 30 years. Afterwards the dynamics of this process is foreseen to slow down. Despite the increase of the revenues of the health care system, the system will face deficit in the close future. This holds for each scenario, however the size of the deficit differs depending on longevity and labour market participation assumptions. Results lead to a discussion on possible reforms of the health care system

Determinants of Obtaining Formal and Informal LTC across European Countries

The aim of this paper is to identify patterns of utilization of formal and informal long term care (LTC) across European countries and discuss possible determinants of demand for different types of care. Specific research questions are of the volume of different types of care and conditions under which care is undertaken. The latter include demographic factors, especially ageing of the society, health status and limitations caused by poor health, family settings and social networking. The analysis indicates substantial differences in obtaining LTC across European countries depending on the tradition and social protection model that determine availability of institutional care and provision of informal care. In the Nordic-type countries with high state responsibility and high provision of institutional care, informal care is of less importance and - if received - it is mostly care provided from on irregular basis from outside the family. With growing needs for care, formal settings come in. Countries of the continental Europe are less unified with high share of people using formal settings of care, but also combining formal and informal care. In Mediterranean countries provision of informal care, including personal care, plays much greater role than formal LTC

‘Other’ Posts in ‘Other’ Places: Poland through a Postcolonial Lens?

Postcolonial theory has tended to focus on those spaces where European colonialism has had a territorial and political history. This is unsurprising, as much of the world is in this sense ‘postcolonial’. But not all of it. This article focuses on Poland, often theorised as peripheral to ‘old Europe’, and explores the application of postcolonial analyses to this ‘other’ place. The article draws upon reflections arising from a study of responses to ethnic diversity in Warsaw, Poland. In doing so we conclude that postcolonialism does indeed offer some important insights into understanding Polish attitudes to other nationalities, and yet more work also needs to be done to make the theoretical bridge. In the case of Poland we propose the ‘triple relation’ be the starting point for such work

Impact of Aging on Curative Health Care Workforce. Country Report Poland

The report discusses employment in the health care system in Poland based on analysis and projections of the demand and supply of medical workforce. The impact of the financial situation and policy on relativelly low employment level of medical personel was accounted for in the analysis while projections were driven by demographic changes in the following two decades. Results of different demographic variants of projections used in Neujobs project and additional scenarios show that while ageing is an important factor that may stimulate demand for provision of medical personnel, changes might be mitigated by further increase in efficiency of care. At the same time the supply of care will be affected by ageing too. The results indicate that more detailed monitoring of employment in the future will be needed in order to assure adequacy of provision of medical professionals, especially of nurses (critical gap), some medical specialists, physiotherapists and medical technical personnel