Long-Term Care and Needs for Improvement as Experienced by Families of Care Recipients

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate the impact of long-term care services on reducing the burden of care on families and to present policy recommendations for improving these services by examining perceived needs for improvements. Families using long-term care have generally had positive experiences with the system, reporting that the services have reduced their burden of care and that their satisfaction with the overall system is high. This study also identified unmet benefit needs among families for some services. I proposed several policy tasks, including: strengthening information and education linkages to ensure families are aware of the available services and how to access them; diversifying visiting service benefits to better meet the needs of families; and strengthening medical services for both home-visit and facility service users to improve the overall operation of the system.