Do informal caregivers for elderly in the community use support measures? A qualitative study in five European countries.

BACKGROUND: Informal caregivers are essential figures for maintaining frail elderly at home. Providing informal care can affect the informal caregivers' physical and psychological health and labour market participation capabilities. They need support to prevent caregiver burden. A variety of existing support measures can help the caregiver care for the elderly at home, but with some limitations. The objective of this review was to explore the experiences of informal caregivers caring for elderly in the community with the use of supportive policy measures in Belgium and compare these to the experiences in other European countries. METHODS: An empirical qualitative case study research was conducted in five European countries (Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, France and Germany). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with informal caregivers and their dependent elderly. Interview data from the different cases were analysed. In particular data from Belgium was compared to data from the cases abroad. RESULTS: Formal services (e.g. home care) were reported to have the largest impact on allowing the caregiver to care for the dependent elderly at home. One of the key issues in Belgium is the lack of timely access to reliable information about formal and informal services in order to proactively support the informal caregiver. Compared to the other countries, informal caregivers in Belgium expressed more difficulties in accessing support measures and navigating through the health system. In the other countries information seemed to be given more timely when home care was provided via care packages. CONCLUSION: To support the informal caregiver, who is the key person to support the frail elderly, fragmentation of information regarding supportive policy measures is an important issue of concern.

Caring, employment and health among adults of working age: evidence from Britain and Belgium.

BACKGROUND: For those of working age, results are inconclusive when exploring the health impact of providing care. Moreover, population data is lacking and the impact of welfare policies on the caregivers' health has not been yet analysed. METHODS: Associations between general health and care giving, adjusting for differences in employment and socio-economic position, were explored for working age adults using logistic regression models. Data came from the 2001 British census (n = 1,361,222, 5% sample) and from the 2001 Belgian census (n = 4,368,637). The final model was stratified by employment status, given the significant interaction between caregiving and employment status. RESULTS: In both countries, when compared with those providing no care, men and women providing >or=20 h of care per week had an increased risk of poor health. This increased risk was attenuated after adjustment for socio-economic position and particularly after adjustment for differences in employment status. However after stratifying by employment status, a dose response relationship between time spent caring and poor health was observed for the employed and unemployed, but not for the economically inactive. CONCLUSIONS: Despite contrasting welfare systems, employment status plays an important role in the association between caring and health in both countries. For the economically active, providing more care increases the risk of poor health. Whilst formal employment may be good for general health, having to informally care whilst in formal employment may have a detrimental health impact.

[Informal health care in Belgium]. / Les soins informels en Belgique.

Research on the provision of care is mostly based on household sample surveys, which cannot measure the prevalence of caregiving in the general population. In order to appraise the individuals' involvement in the provision of informal care, specific questions on the care provided were included in Belgium's 2001 Census. Using data from the census we aim at analyzing how the provision and the amount of informal care, varies with respect to the individual's socio-economic characteristics. We found that 1 out 10 Belgians provide informal care. As expected, most caregivers can be found among middle-aged women. Yet, the percentage of men and women providing informal care at home is quite similar. The education level has an unexpected influence on the provision of care: more educated individuals are more likely to be caregivers while lesser educated individuals are more likely to provide more hours of care. Given that informal care is a valuable resource for meeting the care needs of today's societies, more attention should be given to the consequences of providing it. Indeed, not considering the negative aspects of providing informal care, such as the deterioration in the health status of caregivers or the competing demands between working and caring, can lead to a reduction of the amount of informal care provided.

Patient socioeconomic determinants of the choice of generic versus brand name drugs in the context of a reference price system: evidence from Belgian prescription data.

The generic reference price system (RPS) can impose a financial penalty for patients using a brand name drug instead of its generic alternative. Previous studies on the impact of the RPS have not considered the potentially differential effect of using generic alternatives for individuals with a different socioeconomic background. However, patients' characteristics might determine their overall knowledge of the existence of the system and thus of the financial burden to which they may be confronted. The association between patients' characteristics and the use of generic drugs versus brand name drugs was analyzed for ten highly prescribed pharmaceutical molecules included in the Belgian generic reference price system. Prescriptions were obtained from a 10% sample of all general practitioners in 2008 (corresponding to 120,670 adult patients and 368,101 prescriptions). For each pharmaceutical molecule, logistic regression models were performed, with independent variables for patient socioeconomic background at the individual level (work status, having a guaranteed income and being entitled to increased reimbursement of co-payments) and at the level of the neighborhood (education). The percentage of generic prescriptions ranged from 24.7 to 76.4%, and the mean reference supplement in 2008 ranged from €4.3 to €37.8. For seven molecules, higher use of a generic alternative was associated with either having a guaranteed income, with receiving increased reimbursement of co-payments or with living in areas with the lowest levels of education. Globally, results provided evidence that the generic RPS in Belgium does not lead to a higher financial burden on individuals from a low socioeconomic background.

Patient socioeconomic determinants for the choice of the cheapest molecule within a cluster: evidence from Belgian prescription data.

Reference pricing is a common cost-sharing mechanism, with the financial penalty for the use of costly drugs shifted from the third-party payer to the patient. Unintended distributional consequences might arise, if the weakest socioeconomic groups face a relatively higher financial burden. This study analyzed for a sample of Belgian individual prescription data for 4 clusters of commonly used drugs (proton pump inhibitors, statins and two groups of antihypertensives [drugs acting on renin-angiotensin system and dihydropyridine derivatives]) whether the probability to receive the least expensive molecule within a cluster was linked to the socioeconomic status of the patient. Logistic regression models included individual demographic, working, chronic illness and financial status and small area education data for 906,543 prescriptions from 1,280 prescribing general practitioners and specialists. For the 4 clusters, results show that patients with lower socioeconomic status consistently use slightly more the least expensive drugs than other patients. Larger effects are observed for patients residing in a nursing home for the elderly, patients entitled to increased reimbursement of co-payments, unemployed, patients treated in a primary care center financed per capita (and not fee-for-service) and patients having a chronic illness. Also, patients residing in neighborhoods with low education status use more less expensive drugs. The findings of the study suggest that although equity considerations were not explicitly taken into account in the design of the reference price system, there is no real equity problem, as the costly drugs with supplement are not prescribed more often in patients from lower socioeconomic classes.

Does country influence the health burden of informal care? An international comparison between Belgium and Great Britain.

The aim of this paper is to determine whether the association between the provision of informal care and the health status of caregivers is affected by the country of residence. We focus on two European countries, Belgium and Great Britain, and develop a methodology, which consists of matching a subset of areas from Britain with areas in Belgium that are demographically and socioeconomically similar. These pairs of areas are then used as fixed effects in logistic regressions of poor health. This allows us to take into account the influence of area type on health and to remove the influence of these local contextual characteristics from the estimated country effects. Results suggest that, although caregiving is more prevalent in Britain, the health burden associated with heavy caregiving activities is lower in Britain than in Belgium. This may be explained by the better targeting of long-term home care policies towards more severely dependent patients in Britain than in Belgium.

Using matched areas to explore international differences in population health.

In this paper, we develop and test a method for examining the influence of national level contextual influences on population health. Acknowledging calls for the use of experimental study designs to explore contextual influences on health, we develop a study design in which sets of local areas from Britain and Belgium became akin to two 'treatment' groups; one exposed to British society and culture and the other exposed to Belgian society and culture. The areas are matched on the basis of showing very strong similarities in economic, demographic and historical characteristics. Data describing these characteristics are obtained from national census data. A principal component analysis of these variables permits areas in Britain and Belgium with similar scores on the resulting components to be matched into pairs. A sequence of logistic regression models identifies between-country difference in the risk of reporting poor health. Our final model compares the risk of reporting poor health among Belgians and people from Britain living in similar local contexts, adjusting for any residual differences in individual level characteristics. We compare results from this new method with those from more conventional approaches. All approaches show that residence in Britain is associated with a substantial and significantly higher risk of reporting poor health for both men and women, after adjustment for both individual and local contextual influences. We then critically reflect on our method and on the context-composition framework for research into area variation in health. We conclude that whilst our approach succeeded in applying the idea of comparable groups with different exposures to an observational, international comparison, it also brought associated questions about external validity and the extent to which a sample of matched areas captures a 'national' context.