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Enhancing quality in social care through economic analysis

Population ageing has motivated policy makers around the world to focus on how best to organise health and social care services to meet an aniticipated growing demand on services. Two popular initiatives are reablement and telecare. Reablement is an approach within homecare that enables older individuals with social care needs to improve their functional performance and live independently. Telecare, on the other hand, involves use of devices to monitor individuals' health and safety, and provide response when needed. This thesis investigates the effectiveness of reablement and telecare by conducting a comprehensive review of the literature and undertaking three empirical studies. It is composed of six chapters. The first chapter presents a theoretical model that links the demand for reablement and telecare to various outcomes. The model is estimated using a strategy that controls for the effects of confounding variables and unobservable factors, and is general in the sense that it nests several other estimation strategies and study designs as special cases. The next chapter contains the literature review. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 present the three empirical studies. The first study investigates the effect of telecare on independent living at home; the second study determines the relationship between the use of telecare and admission to hospital, while the third study determines the relationship between telecare use and the length of stay in hospital. Chapter 6 concludes the thesis and provides some suggestions for further research. Unlike the results of the previous studies, the findings from this thesis suggest that the treatment effects are not homogenous across the poulation and also vary depending on the type of telecare device under consideration.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:767746
Date January 2019
CreatorsMomanyi, Kevin
ContributorsMcNamee, Paul
PublisherUniversity of Aberdeen
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=240815

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