Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

The study focuses on the changing impact of increasing longevity, dementia and other memory disorders on the use of and need for informal and formal care in the era of reorganized health and social service structures and ageing in place ideology. The aims are 1) to reveal the effect of dementia and increasing longevity on care use, 2) to explore the possibilities of people with and without dementia to live at home with the help from informal caregivers and formal homecare, and 3) to explore the effect of changes in different health and social care systems on the use of care. The study starts from retrospective investigation of the association of dementia and age at the time of death with health and social care use. The time period studied represents the time during which longevity has increased and long-term care coverage decreased in several countries. I will use Finnish and Swedish national health and social care registers. Next, focus is on how the changes in cognitive ability affect care use and satisfaction with life in the course of ageing, and on the interdependency between them. For this part, I will use data from LASA (the Netherlands) and explore my options to use CLSA data in collaboration with researchers from the University of British Columbia. A six-month visit to UBC in the spring of 2019 is part of this collaboration. Third, an in-depth investigation focus on how people with cognitive problems and/or dementia and their informal caregivers describe their experiences on the adequacy of care and support they receive in the community. I will use longitudinal interview data, collected in Finland in 2018-2020. The study will offer novel information for ageing research and health and social care policymakers. The Project started in 2018 and is funded by the Academy of Finland until July 2021. The project is conducted as part of the studies in Centre of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care (2018-2025) (CoEAgeCare).