Integrated social and health care services among societies in transition: Insights from Turkey.

Societies experiencing rapid demographic transition may expect to face challenges such as accelerated population aging and increasing care-related needs. Decentralization of welfare states and resultant fragmentation of services is gaining increasing attention. In this study, we offer suggestions of how developing countries might move from fragmentation to integration of social and health care services. Using the Health Survey of Turkey (HST-2012) data with 15,000 households of populations' age 15 and older, we explore challenges to integrating social and health care service strategies in Turkey. Findings include inequities in material and service accessibility between rural and urban settings. Increasing numbers of older widowed women, especially in rural environments, will require direct income assistance over the coming decades. Additional findings include the need for primary and preventative health care services for middle age groups and strategies to address both unemployment among younger generations and barriers to work force participation for women. In conclusion, among rapid transition societies, it will take time to resolve decentralization-related regional inequalities in social and health services. Therefore, information and communications technologies (ICT) should be employed from an intersectionality perspective to more quickly bridge the services integration - regional inequalities gap in Turkey and possibly other societies in transition.