[Sharing informal care: What are the considerations?] / Het delen van mantelzorg: wat zijn de overwegingen?

Due to social, political, and demographic developments in Dutch healthcare, the pressure on informal carers of vulnerable, senior citizens living at home continues to increase. To relieve this pressure, people in the senior citizens' social network are looking for ways to share care tasks with others. However, many informal caregivers seem to experience a threshold in this respect. This pilot study focuses on understanding the considerations involved in sharing caregiving tasks with others. Therefore, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six informal caregivers of single, senior citizens living at home. This study shows that these considerations are characterised by a relationship between informal caregivers' workload, their shyness to ask others for help, and the perception of care recipients' demand, combined with informal caregivers' natural inclination to do it themselves. Feelings of being responsible for the care and behaviour of care recipients, and the choices that must be made for them seem to play an additional role. To develop adequate solutions that lead to sharing informal care with others, and relieving the pressure on informal caregivers, more insight into the (personal) mechanisms behind this sense of responsibility seems necessary.

Ageing Well in Small Villages: What Keeps Older Adults Happy? Environmental Indicators of Residential Satisfaction in Four Dutch Villages.

This article aims to contribute to the existing literature about liveability in rural areas by explicitly focusing on the level of residential satisfaction of older adults (55+) in four small Dutch villages. We strive not only to identify the key indicators of residential satisfaction among older villagers but also to better understand how these indicators affect their (daily) life. Moreover, in line with the person-environment fit tradition, we differentiate according to the capabilities and vulnerabilities of older villagers. To this end, we use a mixed-method approach, in which we combine survey data with qualitative data collected with photovoice in the four villages. The findings indicate that older adults' perceptions of spatial, social and functional aspects of the living environment are related to the degree of residential satisfaction overall. However, these perceptions appear to be strongly intertwined, especially perceptions about spatial characteristics, local identity and connectedness. Older adults who are hindered by health problems in undertaking daily activities experience a lower level of person-environment fit, which is reflected in a lower level of residential satisfaction. However, this relationship between subjective health and residential satisfaction can only be partially explained by different perceptions of the spatial, social and functional environment.