The Relationship Between Informal and Formal Care

Abstract

Public responsibility for old age frailty and disability has a long history in Scandinavia. Old age pension was introduced in Denmark in 1891, the first country in the world to establish pension with no frailty criteria, in Sweden in 1913, and in Norway in 1937 [1]. Long-term care developed from the 1950s and on as part of the development of the welfare state. Out of the poorhouse tradition of the nineteenth century grew old age homes. Home help services were established in the early 1950s and expanded substantially during the following two decades, while nursing homes increasingly substituted for the traditional old age homes. The policy of the 1980s was characterized by a change to a deinstitutionalization policy, where sheltered housing facilities, day care centers, district nursing, 24-hour home care, delivery of aids and appliances for handicapped persons—all this partly substituted for traditional institutional care [2].