Anastasia Arabadzhyan
The COVID-19 pandemic had a big impact on health and social care, leaving many people without the support they needed. In this study, we use anonymised data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, which surveys individuals aged 50 and over, living in private households in England, to investigate how the pandemic changed their use of home care.
We find that fewer people received home care during the pandemic, mainly because help from family and friends became less available. People from ethnic minority groups, individuals not in work or retirement (due to long-term sickness or disability, family responsibilities, or unemployment), and people with a mental health condition were most likely to lose access to home care. However, those who did continue to get home care reported having used more of it, except for people from ethnic minority groups, those in work, and those living alone. As a result of these changes, more people reported unmet need during the pandemic, particularly those from ethnic minority groups, individuals with musculoskeletal and mental health conditions, and those not in work or retirement.
Overall, while pandemic policies were designed to protect vulnerable people, they also made it harder for many to access essential care, increasing unmet needs and deepening existing inequalities. This implies that emergency preparedness and recovery planning, which are important in the current socio-political climate, must aim increase capacity and resilience of formal and informal care systems and better target support to those most reliant on such care.
Anastasia Arabadzhyan, anastasia.arabadzhyan@york.ac.uk
(this work is already published, the link to the paper is here)
