A short introduction to ANCIEN

Assessing Needs of Care in European Nations, ANCIEN

is a research project financed under the 7th EU Research Framework Programme. The project includes 20 partners from EU member states, started in January 2009 and will last 44 months. 

ANCIEN concerns the future of long-term care (LTC) for the elderly in Europe. The questions we ask in ANCIEN are:

1) How will need, demand, supply and use of LTC develop?

2) How do different systems of LTC perform?

The project proceeds in consecutive steps of collecting and analysing information and projecting future scenarios on long term care needs, use, quality assurance and system performance. State of the art demographic, epidemiologic and econometric modelling will be used to interpret and project needs, supply and use of long term care over future time periods for different long term care systems.

The project started with collecting information and data to portray long-term care in Europe (WP 1). After provision of a framework for individual country reports including data templates, information was collected and typologies of LTC systems were created. The collected data forms the basis of estimates of actual and future long term care needs in selected countries (WP 2). WP 3 builds on the estimates of needs to characterise the response: the provision and determinants of formal and informal care across European long-term care systems. Special emphasis is put on identifying the impact of regulation on the choice of care and the supply of caregivers. WP 6 integrates the results of work packages 1, 2 and 3 using econometric micro and macro-modeling, translating the projected needs derived from WP2 into projected use by using the behavioral models developed in WP3, taking into account the availability and regulation of formal and informal care and the potential use of technological developments. 

On the backbone of projections of needs, provisions and use in European long term care systems, WP 4 addresses developing technology as a factor in the process of change occurring in long term care. This project aims to work out generalisable principles to cope with the role of evolving technology, considering the cultural, economic, regulatory and organizational conditions. WP 5 addresses quality assurance. Together with WP 1, WP 5 reviews the policies on LTC quality assurance and the quality indicators in the EU member states, and assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the various quality assurance policies. Finally WP 7 analyses systems performance, identifying best practices and studying trade-offs between quality, accessibility and affordability.

The final result of all work packages is a comprehensive overview of the long term care systems of EU nations, a description and projection of needs, provision and use for selected countries combined with a description of systems, and of quality assurance and an analysis of systems performance. The organisation responsible for administrative coordination and dissemination of the general results is CEPS (WP 8 and 9). The Belgian Federal Planning Bureau (FPB) and the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) are responsible for scientific coordination.

European Network of Economic Policy Research Institutes (ENEPRI)