Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 November 2010
Long-term care is available for individuals with functional incapacities. Long-term care includes medical, social, and personal hygiene services, which help to maintain the autonomy of the elderly and allows them to live with dignity in spite of loss of autonomy. This definition provides long-term care services with a goal and a clientele. However, are individuals with functional incapacities first and foremost chronically ill? Should long-term care services be conceptualized as independent from medical care? Provincial government policy documents promote a social model of long-term care which privileges community services as opposed to institutional services. What in fact does this choice imply? To what extent have resources been allocated in accordance with these objectives? A study of these questions based on Canadian data on the relationship between illnesses, disabilities and functional incapacity and data from a historical survey of expenditures in Quebec for hospital care, medical care, institutional long-term care and community services indicates that illnesses, disabilities, and functional incapacity, although strongly correlated in an elderly population, cannot be collapsed into one big category for planning services; co-ordinated services in a multidisciplinary approach are needed, not dominance from one professional group. As to costs, an examination of the data shows that in relative terms costs for community care tended to increase significantly in the recent past. Yet it is not clear that there has been a transfer from short-term medical and hospital services to long-term care. However, there has been an important internal change in hospital costs, with the elderly representing the only group whose costs are rising. In short, despite the political rhetoric on long-term care for the elderly promoting a community approach, these services' main function is still the surveillance of the vulnerable elderly in both short- and long-term care facilities; adapting the elderly to their environment and the environment to the elderly play a growing, though minor, role in the overall picture of medical and social services.
Les services de longue durée (SLD) sont données à des personnes âgées qui ont des incapacités fonctionnelles. Ils sont un ensemble de services médicaux, sociaux et d'hygiène personnelle qui visent à maintenir l'autonomie des personncs âgées et à vivre avec dignité les pertes d'autonomie. Cette définition des SLD leur donne un objectif qui vise une clientèle particulière. Mais dans les faits, les personnes avec incapacité fonctionnelle ne sont-elles pas avant tout des personnes malades et invalides? Quelle est l'autonomie relative des SLD vis-à-vis des services médicaux traditionnels? Les documents d'orientation politique des gouvernements provinciaux promeuvent un modèle social pour les SLD qui privilégie les services communautaires plutôt qu'institutionnels. Qu'a voulu dire, dans les faits, ce choix? Dans quelle mesure les ressources ont-elles suivies les orientations? L'examen de ces questions à l'aide de données sur les rapports entre maladies, invalidités et incapacités fonctionnelles et de données sur l'évaluation historique des dépenses du Québec en matière de services hospitaliers, de soins médicaux, d'hébergement de longue durée et de services communautaires montrent que les maladies, invalidités et incapacités fonctionnelles quoique fortement associées ne peuvent s'assimiler les unes aux autres; la nécessaire coordination des services n'implique pas la domination de l'un par rapport aux autres. En ce qui concerne les dépenses, l'examen des données démontre que la part des services communautaires tend à augmenter de façon importante en termes relatifs. Mais, il n'y a pas eu de transfert visible du secteur des services médicaux et hospitaliers de courte durée aux SLD. Les dépenses hospitalières ont cependant subies une transformation interne importante, les personnes âgées représentent la seule clientèle en hausse dans ce secteur. En somme, malgré la rhétorique politique sur les SLD et les services aux personnes âgées, ceux-ci ont encore pour rôle de surveiller les personnes âgées vulnérables dans des établissements de soins de courte ou de longue durée. Le rôle d'adaptation de la personne âgée et de son environnement aux incapacités fonctionnelles tient une place croissante mais mineure dans l'ensemble des services médicaux et sociaux.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.