Documents home care 51 results

"Par diverses mesures de politiques publiques, notamment la réduction / crédit d'impôt pour l'emploi d'un salarié à domicile, la France soutient depuis plus de deux décennies le secteur des services à la personne. Cet article réalise une comparaison critique des évaluations de ces mesures afin d'en donner la vision la plus globale possible. Il en ressort que les hausses successives du plafond des dépenses éligibles ont été moins efficaces en termes de coût public par emploi créé que la mise en place initiale de la réforme, où le plafond était relativement bas. D'un point de vue redistributif, les services répondant à des besoins sociaux (garde d'enfant, aide à la dépendance) ne représentent qu'une part minoritaire des sommes allouées par la subvention fiscale, qui bénéficie principalement aux ménages les plus aisés."

"This report gives an overview of the current and emerging OSH issues for health- and social care workers and how these affect their safety and health at work and influence the quality of care they provide. It combines a literature review and the responses received to a questionnaire sent to OSH experts in all Member States, therefore allowing the findings from the literature to be compared with those from the ‘front line'. The report highlights the challenges facing the sector, including shortages of skilled and experienced professionals, an ageing workforce, increased use of technology requiring new skills and the introduction of new care pathways to tackle multiple chronic conditions. The fact that people are living longer and increasingly needing long-term care shifts the emphasis from the controlled setting of acute hospital care to care in the community and people's homes. The home care setting presents a particularly difficult work environment owing to small work spaces, lack of training, lone working, little or no supervision and having to face the same hazards as those encountered in, for example, hospitals but with insufficient measures in place to control the risks."

"Les politiques de la prise en charge de la dépendance sont à l'origine de la construction d'un champ d'activité qui n'a jamais été défini formellement, mais qu'elles structurent par leurs prescriptions. Ce cadre réglementaire contribue à faire émerger une certaine définition de l'aide à domicile qui n'est pas toujours en adéquation avec les besoins des personnes en perte d'autonomie. Il ne permet notamment pas la prise en charge d'activités moins traditionnellement considérées comme de « l'aide à domicile » et écarte, par construction, les hommes. Si, au niveau des tâches constitutives de l'aide au maintien à domicile, les hommes participent au sein de la sphère familiale, il semblerait qu'ils s'excluent ou soient exclus de l'aide professionnelle. À partir d'une enquête statistique exploratoire et d'entretiens ethnographiques, nous montrons les processus d'exclusion des hommes et l'adaptation de l'activité exercée par ceux qui néanmoins investissent ce secteur professionnel."

"Homecare is a major source of women's low-wage employment in the UK. Practices of unpaid working time are widespread and many workers are not paid in accordance with their existing national minimum wage entitlements. On 1 April 2015, a new duty of well-being in social care came into force and local authorities are required to promote the control of care by service-users. As a consequence, homecare workers will increasingly be engaged in complex multi-lateral work relations and subject to multi-party control. This article examines how the national minimum wage entitlements of homecare workers have been legally interpreted and questions if their entitlements might be adversely affected under provisions of the Care Act 2014. There is a legacy of judicial decision-making in which care-giving is not recognised as ‘work' for the purposes of the national minimum wage. Yet recent decisions have produced a more satisfactory entitlement framework by establishing that employer control over working time determines ‘work'. However, it seems this framework is put at risk by the statutory promotion of service-user control. As work relations are re-cast, contractual relationships in which care-giving falls outside the protection of national minimum wage law will appear increasingly attractive because they may both enhance service-user control and facilitate very low cost labour. Without innovation in legal treatments of multi-party control and sustained attention to the worth of care-giving as employment, the rights of homecare workers are at risk under the Care Act 2014."

"The United States does not have a comprehensive long-term care system. Arguably, it has no system at all. Medicare does not cover long-term care services. Private long-term care insurance remains expensive and not available to everyone. Americans rely primarily upon the unpaid contributions of family members and friends, who provide the vast majority of LTC services received by people of all ages who need help with basic daily activities. Medicaid, a safety net program and payer of last resort designed for people with low incomes and few assets, is the primary public financing system for LTC, with benefits varying from state to state. European perspectives on LTC are a largely untapped resource for examining ways to improve the financing and delivery of LTC in the U.S. Virtually all European countries have had far higher proportions of people age 80 and older than the U.S. has had for some time. Some of these countries have implemented LTC programs that hold important lessons for the U.S. and can serve as “natural laboratories” for tracking the impact of LTC policy changes over time. This paper concentrates on describing the LTC systems in the Netherlands, Norway and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom and France"

" The long-term care system in Spain has been characterised by decentralisation, marketisation, fiscal austerity and its reliance on informal family care and cheap migrant labour. Focusing on home-help services, this article addresses the extent to which the sector's multi-level system of collective bargaining can be characterised as fragmented and whether this has had a negative effect on employment conditions. The research involved an analysis of the legal and collective bargaining framework, expert interviews and employee focus groups. We argue that the precedence given to sectoral agreements within public procurement processes is one main factor preventing a move towards ‘disorganised decentralisation' in the aftermath of the 2012 labour market reform. Moderate decentralisation has favoured heterogeneity in pay and working conditions at regional and provincial levels. However, these mid-level collective agreements have improved standards with respect to the national collective agreement, and there has been a minor increase in the number of company-level collective agreements since the reform. The limited professionalisation, the lack of recognition of skills and effort in occupational classifications, and the organisation of working time emerge as key contributors to the sector's poor employment conditions."

"One aspect of demographic ageing is the growing demand for domestic and care services. This highlights the increasingly central role of domestic work. The emergence of digital labour platforms in this context represents a significant shift within a sector characterised by informality, weak labour protections and complex social needs. This paper offers a first comparative mapping of home care and cleaning service platforms across six European countries – Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain – representing different welfare and regulatory systems. The study investigates two questions: (i) Do these platforms contribute to the formalisation of domestic work, or do they risk reinforcing informal practices? (ii) What organisational patterns have emerged across national contexts and how are they shaped by different welfare regimes? By cross-referencing two key dimensions – management of the matching process and regulation of employment relationships – the article develops a fourfold typology of digital platforms: marketplaces, digital agencies, on-demand platforms, and regulated marketplaces. Although all platforms present themselves formally as intermediaries, each type performs this role in distinct ways, with varying implications for employment arrangements and working conditions. Moreover, the findings reveal cross-national variation in terms of the prevalence of digital platforms. Countries characterised by higher public service provision, such as Denmark, have a minimal presence. Beyond national specificities, however, the nature of the service provided – cleaning versus care – constitutes a more salient factor in platform organisational models. The marketplace is more dominant in cleaning services and digital agencies than in care services."

"This article seeks to understand a puzzling finding: that workers in publicly funded home care for older people in Australia, compared to those in Sweden, feel that they are better able to meet their clients' needs, that their workplaces are less pressed, and that their work is less burdensome and more compatible with their family and social commitments. This finding seems to challenge expectations fostered by comparative sociological research that job quality and care services are inferior in Australia compared to Sweden. Informed by comparative institutionalist theory and care research, the structures and dynamics of the care systems in the two countries are analysed, along with findings from the NORDCARE survey of home care workers conducted in Sweden in 2005 (n=166) and Australia in 2010 (n=318). Differences in the work and working conditions in the two countries are explained by the dynamic interaction of national institutional and highly gendered sector-level effects."