This volume and its companion, The new dynamics of ageing volume 2, provide comprehensive multi-disciplinary overviews of the very latest research on ageing. It reports the outcomes of the most concerted investigation ever undertaken into both the influence shaping the changing nature of ageing and its consequences for individuals and society.This book concentrates on three major themes: active ageing, design for ageing well and the relationship between ageing and socio-economic de...

Since the early 1990s, long-term care policies have undergone significant transformations across OECD countries. In some countries these changes have responded to the introduction of major policy reforms while in others, significant transformations have come about through the accumulation of incremental policy changes.The book brings together evidence from over 15 years of care reform to examine changes in long-term care systems occurring in OECD countries. It discusses and compare...

Universal healthcare, perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Canada's public policy, is under fire, criticized for its heavy expense and questionable sustainability. In Where to From Here?: Keeping Medicare Sustainable, Stephen Duckett defends Canadian Medicare, addressing key concerns and refuting criticism, while also acknowledging flaws in the system and room for improvement.Duckett argues that while the fundamentals of Medicare are sound, a great deal of change is ...

How can we ensure high-quality public services such as health care and education? Governments spend huge amounts of public money on public services such as health, education, and social care, and yet the services that are actually delivered are often low quality, inefficiently run, unresponsive to their users, and inequitable in their distribution. In this book, Julian Le Grand argues that the best solution is to offer choice to users and to encourage competition among providers. Le Grand ...

The number of elderly people relying on formal long-term care services is dramatically increasing year after year, and the challenge of ensuring the quality and financial stability of care provision is one faced by governments in both the developed and developing world. This edited book is the first to provide a comprehensive international survey of long-term care provision and regulation, built around a series of case studies from Europe, North America and Asia. The analytical framework a...

Outcome in the management of public services refers to the impact of a particular public sector activity. This book provides a critical assessment of the way outcome is measured, exploring the need to balance objective and subjective forms of

In an era of scarce social resources the question of the changing social policy constructions and responses to disabled people has become increasingly important. Paradoxically, some disabled people are realising new freedoms and choices never before envisioned, whilst others are prey to major retractions in public services and aggressive attempts to redefine who counts as 'genuinely disabled'.Understanding disability policy locates disability policy into broader social policy and w...

Over the last two decades, many changes have happened to the social welfare policies of various industrial countries. Citizens have seen their pensions, unemployment benefits, and general healthcare policies shrink as “belt tightening” measures are enforced. But in contrast, long-term care has seen a general growth in public financing, an expansion of beneficiaries, and, more generally, an attempt to define larger social responsibilities and related social rights.The aim of this bo...

In 1983, the first patient classification system to be used on a national basis, the Diagnosis Relate Groups (DRGs), was adopted as part of the Prospective Payment System in the United States. This system caught the attention of health policy makers in other countries, and a number of them began to implement similar approaches. What motivated them to adopt these systems? What similarities and differences were there among their experiences in implementing these systems? What can we learn ab...

EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This is the first book to challenge the concept of paid work for disabled people as a means to ‘independence’ and ‘self determination’. Recent attempts in many countries to increase the employment rates of disabled people have actually led to an erosion of financial support for many workless disabled people and their increasing stigmatisation as ‘scroungers’. Led by the disability movement’s concern with the employment choices ...

Child poverty is a central and present part of global life, with hundreds of millions of children around the world enduring tremendous suffering and deprivation of their most basic needs. Despite its long history, research on poverty and development has only relatively recently examined the issue of child poverty as a distinct topic of concern. This book brings together theoretical, methodological and policy-relevant contributions by leading researchers on international child poverty....

The credit crunch is a threat to publicly funded health care. World-leading health economist Cam Donaldson defends our systems on the same basis as those who seek to erode public services, namely, that of economic efficiency. However, protecting government funding of health care is not enough. Donaldson goes on to show how we can get more out of our systems by addressing issues of value for money. This raises several practical and moral issues, such as: What have we achieved through contin...