Health policies and data

Long-Term Care

Send

Welcome to the OECD Long-Term Care (LTC) homepage. This page will provide you with all information on ongoing and past work on LTC - that is, care for people needing support in many facets of living over a prolonged period of time. The OECD Health Division examines challenges affecting LTC systems and services, focusing particularly on the elderly population.

A Good Life in Old Age? Monitoring and Improving Quality in Long-Term Care
(released 17 June 2013)

Long-term care that is safe, effective, and responsive to needs – quality long-term care services – has received much attention and policy priority for governments as a growing number of frail old people are into need of care. A Good Life in Old Age? Monitoring and Improving Quality in Long-term Care offers evidence and examples of useful experiences from countries to help policy makers, providers and experts measure and improve the quality of long-term care services.
A Good Life in Old Age? Monitoring and Improving Quality in Long-term Care contains written contributions from OECD and experts and academics from countries across Europe, Canada, and the United States. The project was supported by the European Commission (DG Employment).

Help Wanted? Providing and Paying for Long-Term Care

Often, policymakers have treated long-term care reform as being too tough a nut to crack, but there are many examples of good practice worthy of emulation.
Help Wanted? Providing and Financing Long-Term Care addresses these questions. The publication is the outcome of work undertaken at the OECD during 2009 and 2010. A description of the main goals of the project can be found here.

The project builds upon on-going LTC data work, the OECD Health Working Paper No. 44 and work on workforce shortages and migration.

Strengthening Data on Long-Term Care Systems

OECD Health Data 2012 collects data on long-term care expenditure, recipients of long-term care services and sources of funding for long-term care spending. Revisions to the definition and estimation methods of long-term care expenditure are a key component of the process of revision of the System of Health Accounts (SHA) manual which aims at improving the comparability of LTC expenditure data, as well as feasibility of the estimation methods. A report, Conceptual Framework and Methods for Analysis of Data Sources for Long-Term Care Expenditure, begins to refine the definition methodology to improve the availability and comparability of long-term care expenditure data.

New: Access the full dataset on Long-Term Care, as available in OECD Health Data 2012 (Excel file to download)

Health at a Glance 2011: Special Chapter on Long-Term Care

The sixth edition of Health at a Glance (released in November 2011) includes a special chapter on long-term care. Health at a Glance, a flagship OECD publication, provides the latest comparable data on different aspects of the performance of health systems in OECD countries.

Healthy Ageing Policies

A review of current policies to prevent the onset of old-age disability, or so-called “healthy ageing policies” was released in February 2009 as OECD Health Working Paper No. 42. This paper identifies four different groups of policies: i) working longer and promoting social integration; ii) improving lifestyles; iii) adapting health care systems to the needs of the elderly; and iv) attacking underlying social/environmental factors affecting healthy ageing.

Disability

The OECD published Health Working Paper No 26 in 2006, which assesses disability trends among elderly people (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States).

Follow us

Health policies and data

Long-Term Care

Countries list

Topics list