Sophie Ces,
Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium
Title: Estimation Of The Cost Of The Home-Based Support Of The Frail Older People Living At Home In Belgium
Biography
Biography: Sophie Ces,
Abstract
The article focuses on the estimation of the costs of long term care, both formal and informal care, provided to the frail older people living at home in Belgium. A typology of situations is built by combining the level of impairment and the presence of informal caregivers is used to describe the costs of long term care. The cost estimation is performed for the patients, the informal caregivers, the National Institute for Health and Disability Insurance.Individual data are collected through patient questionnaires: the inter RAI Home Care instrument and an ad-hoc questionnaire for assessing the utilisation of non-health care services at home and the time spent on informal caregiving. In complement, the data of the reimbursed health care consumption (routinely recorded by the health care insurance) is also available for the sample. The “normal” consumption part for the household aid, pedicure or meals-on-wheels has to be retrieved since they are not specific to frailty. Therefore, to obtain a sample of individuals with similar characteristics (e.g. the age, the socio-economic status, gender,) but without any disability, a propensity score is used. The time spent on informal caregiving is valued by using the proxy-good method. The costs of the health care reimbursed services are directly available in the official database. The estimation of the different cost components of long care for the frail older people living at home will allow an accurate description of the contributions of the main stakeholders in Belgium according to the different types of situations (impairment level/informal caregiver presence).
