Challenges in long-term care of the elderly in Central and Eastern Europe

The purpose of this report is to shed light on the growing long-term care challenges in social protection, with a particular focus on the Central and Eastern European countries.

Long-term care of the elderly is an imminent policy issue for countries facing profound demographic transformations due to ageing. Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries face complex challenges in securing accessible, adequate and sustainable long-term care. While CEE countries anticipate a growing number of elderly persons in need of long-term care as a consequence of global population ageing, these countries still need to improve their institutional care infrastructure and develop the mechanisms to support home-based care. Furthermore, the increasing number of migrant care workers from CEE countries (many of whom are women) will further restrict the potential supply of carers.

The purpose of this report is to shed light on the growing long-term care challenges in social protection, with a particular focus on the CEE countries.

This report is organized as follows. Section 1 presents the key issues relating to long-term care. Section 2 reviews the current provision of long-term care systems in four CEE countries. Section 3 analyses the migrant care workers from Ukraine and Poland. Section 4 summarizes these findings, and discusses their policy implications in the future.