About this Research Topic

Background

Long-term care is essential to the quality of life of older people. It enables older people to maintain a level of functional capability consistent with their basic rights, freedoms, and human dignity. As population ageing continues to accelerate across the world, meeting the rising demand for long-term care is set to be a global challenge facing many societies. Not only should the long-term care system of a country be sustainable and efficient in care production in the long run, but also it must ensure care adequacy and quality and promote distributive fairness for every member in a society.

A thorough investigation into the long-term care for older people is a fundamental step if we want to build a sustainable and resilient long-term care system. Through cutting-edge research in this collection, we aim to have a systematic understanding of the demographic, social, and economic dimensions of long-term care utilization and provision and their implications for policies and wellbeing of older people. This Research Topic will take a global perspective and a multi-disciplinary approach. It will place great emphasis on high-quality evidence which advances the long-term care research agenda and informs policy making on the basis of rigorous studies and innovative research designs and methods. This Research Topic especially welcomes high-quality contributions which cover geographical areas that are less represented in the literature or address global challenges that have wider implications beyond a particular country context.

We welcome submissions of empirical studies in the following themes:

• Demand for long-term care

• Care workforce and caregiving

• Equity of long-term care

• Financing of long-term care

• Quality of long-term care

• Choice and personalization in long-term care

• Long-term care and wellbeing of older people

• Projections of long-term care demand or supply

• Integration of healthcare, social care, and other services promoting care in the community

• End-of-life care in the community

Submission will take the form of original research articles or brief policy reports. We welcome both quantitative and qualitative studies. We encourage submissions drawing on large-scale longitudinal datasets or linked datasets. Comparative analyses with a clear policy implication are also welcome.

Keywords: aging, long-term care, quality of life, global perspective, older people, population aging

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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