Institute of Spatial Planning, Environmental Planning and Land Rearrangement, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, Peter-Jordan-Straße 82, 1190 Vienna, Austria.
Department for Geodesy and Geoinformation, Research Group Cartography, Vienna University of Technology, Erzherzog-Johann-Platz 1/120-6, 1040 Vienna, Austria.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Sep 2;17(17):6406. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17176406.
Long-distance caregiving (LDC) is an issue of growing importance in the context of assessing the future of elder care and the maintenance of health and well-being of both the cared-for persons and the long-distance caregivers. Uncertainty in the international discussion relates to the relevance of spatially related aspects referring to the burdens of the long-distance caregiver and their (longer-term) willingness and ability to provide care for their elderly relatives. This paper is the result of a first attempt to operationalize and comprehensively analyze the spatial relatedness of long-distance caregiving against the background of the international literature by combining a longitudinal single case study of long-distance caregiving person and semantic hierarchies. In the cooperation of spatial sciences and geoinformatics an analysis grid based on a graph-theoretical model was developed. The elaborated conceptual framework should stimulate a more detailed and precise interdisciplinary discussion on the spatial relatedness of long-distance caregiving and, thus, is open for further refinement in order to become a decision-support tool for policy-makers responsible for social and elder care and health promotion. Moreover, it may serve as a starting point for the development of a method for the numerical determination of the long-distance caregivers on different spatial reference scales.
长途护理（LDC）是评估未来老年护理以及被护理者和长途护理者健康和福祉的一个日益重要的问题。国际讨论中的不确定性涉及与空间相关方面的相关性，这些方面涉及长途护理者的负担及其（长期）为老年亲属提供护理的意愿和能力。本文是首次尝试通过结合长途护理者的纵向单案例研究和语义层次结构，在国际文献的背景下对长途护理的空间相关性进行操作和综合分析的结果。在空间科学和地理信息学的合作下，开发了一个基于图论模型的分析网格。详细阐述的概念框架应激发更详细和精确的跨学科讨论，即长途护理的空间相关性，因此，该框架是开放的，可以进一步改进，以便成为负责社会和老年护理以及健康促进的政策制定者的决策支持工具。此外，它可以作为开发用于在不同空间参考尺度上确定长途护理者数量的方法的起点。
