Publication details
Post-Socialist eldercare in the Czech Republic : institutions, families, and the market
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | The chapter focuses on the developments in the organization of elder care in the Czech Republic. It looks into the organization of eldercare services before and after the fall of communism. We describe the main topics addressed by research on care services, outline the historical developments in eldercare organization, and investigate the shifts in social services during the post-1989 transformation process. We are particularly interested in how the communist legacy is inscribed in contemporary ideas and practices of how elder care should be provided. Our analysis of existing research and data shows that since the early 1990s, there have been several changes in how elder care is organized, how the normative idea(l)s of elder care are constructed, and how the care recipients’ problems are perceived in social policy discourse. We focus on three important issues that we identified in contemporary research on elder care in the Czech Republic: the role of family, deinstitutionalization and decentralization, and commodification of elder care. In our chapter we show the specificity of the post-socialist elder care in the Czech Republic which, historically, has been developed from a phase of de-familialism through explicit familialism to implicit familialism and hybrid possibilities offering various types of elder care from the state, the family, the marketplace, and medical services. |