Building Sustainable Care Systems for Older People in the Nordic-Baltic Region (SustainCare)

Project no.: 222159

Project description: The SustainCare project addresses the challenge of sustainability of Long-Term Care (LTC) for older people living at home, seeing this as an integration of formal and informal care systems. While Nordic countries are known in the welfare literature for the extensive formal LTC provision (e.g. municipal home care and home nursing), also in these countries older people living at home rely on informal LTC from family, friends, volunteers and community-based networks. In the Baltics, where formal care is less developed, informal care is even more critical. However, ageing populations and weakening family and community ties strain both care systems. This necessitates the need for better understanding what is the optimal combinations of formal and informal care resources and for developing new support systems for addressing inequalities in care resources.

The multi-disciplinary project will generate new knowledge and evidence-based solutions that will help the Nordic and Baltic countries to identify present and future care gaps for older people living at home and address these gaps with a strengthened community involvement. This will allow a more preventive and efficient care provision to ensure equitable resource distribution and systemic sustainability of formal and informal care. We focus on how older adults’ needs for daily living assistance are met and the extent to which these are provided by formal LTC or informal caregivers.

The project’s goals, achieved via Nordic-Baltic scientific research and user and stakeholder collaboration, include:

• Identifying present and future demographic and health related needs to better prioritize resources for older people living at home
• Assessing the current balance of formal and informal care, and related unmet need for care and care poverty, from an equity perspective
• Investigating how policy reforms have and intend to address sustainability of formal and informal care systems and whether these align with the perspectives of users and stakeholders.
• Developing, implementing and testing an innovative community-based intervention of mutual support to optimize care resources and support older adults’ quality of life, independence, and coping.
• Training early career scholars and influencing policy and practice nationally and internationally.

Using existing longitudinal survey data, new qualitative interviews, register data, and policy documents, the project ensures efficient and reliable outcomes.

Project coordinator: Roskilde University (Denmark)

Partners: Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) (Finland), Tampere University (Finland), University of Jyväskylä (Finland), University of Copenhagen (Denmark), Stockholm Gerontology Research Center (Sweden)

Project duration: 2026 01 01 – 2029 12 31

Contribution to ISM: € 146 228 Eur

ISM role: project partner

Principal ISM researcher: Prof. Dr. Virginija Poškutė

Funding: NORDFORSK under the call for proposals on Sustainable health and social care systems for elderly