20 research outputs found
Problems of dependency groups: The care of the elderly, the handicapped and the chronically ill
Robert G. Evans, Morris L. Barer and Theodore R. Marmor de Gruyter, Why Are Some People Healthy and Others Not? The Determinants of Health of Populations, New York, 1994, 378 pp. cloth 173 DM, paper 98 DM
Peter Laslett, A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1989, 213 pp. £16.95, ISBN 0 297 79451 5.
Contextual variations in the meaning of health inequality
The meaning of inequality in health is contextually determined; it changes both within and between countries and over time. This paper points to the limited ability of the classic class-based analyses of inequalities in health to explain such change. An alternative form of analysis, based on the interaction between age, gender and cause of death is proposed. Within this framework, intercountry (European) comparisons of life expectancy and age-specific mortality for both sexes are used to illustrate a shift over time in the social aetiology of disease from economic to behaviourally based causality. Implications for the British experience and for British social policy are discussed.inequality health social class gender mortality disease social context Britain
Public preferences for the care of dependency groups
In the context of the continuing debate about how responsibility for the care of the disabled, chronically sick and elderly (collectively termed dependency groups) should be allocated as between the family and state and informal and formal caring agencies, this paper reports the basic findings of a survey of care preferences advocated by the public in three locations in Scotland, an urban metropolis, a large city and a small town in a rural setting. The results show that while there is little difference in preference patterns between the locations the public is discriminating in its support for care arrangements for patient/client groups with age-related physical and mental impairment. Overall, there is considerable support for a range of services termed community based professional care--day care centres, day hospitals and in respect of the elderly, sheltered housing. Residential care is less often preferred with the notable exception of senile dementia. Similarly, there is only limited support for informal care without professional involvement. The public, it seems, are not inclined to allocate the major responsibility for the care of dependency groups to the family and close kin preferring instead a continued policy of partnership between informal care systems and the welfare state in which the former does not replace the latter.