Home-based care Models for Elderly in India and Sweden: Value Perspectives of Stakeholders

The study aims to explore and understand models that are integrating user-perspectives with societal and organizational values and preconditions in the domain of home-based elderly care in India and Sweden. The study addresses questions like, what kind of value-based dilemmas are experienced by managers and workers of elderly care in their work and during their work with improvements of elderly care, what are the contemporary models which are successful and which have failed in terms of value-integration in the specific socio-cultural contexts, what contemporary models are needed which addresses to the cultural and contextual needs of older persons and what are the key-components for capacity-building in (learning and developing) elderly care models in India, keeping the Swedish framework in perspective and integrating it to the cultural context. The study reports findings from 60 cognitive interviews conducted in two cities, namely, Vadodara and Mumbai on various stakeholders like, elderly who are receiving and not receiving home based care, care givers, managers of home-based care organizations, doctors giving referrals, and the relevant non-government organizations to understand the models of sustainable home-based care in rural and urban India. These findings are then compared with the existing models of elderly care in Sweden with reference to the existing cultural contexts and system frameworks of both the countries. The findings highlight the differences in service requirements, expectations, and indigenous existing models in the diverse socio-cultural context of India with implications for planning interventions in forms of research-supported learning networks to develop the close-to-practice management systems of integrated care.