Center for Health Economics Research Hannover (CHERH), Leibniz University Hannover, Otto-Brenner-Str.7, 30159, Hannover, Germany.
Health Services Research Unit, AOK Lower Saxony, Hannover, Germany.
Eur J Health Econ. 2023 Apr;24(3):425-436. doi: 10.1007/s10198-022-01483-5. Epub 2022 Jun 11.
As the German population is continually aging and the majority of older adults still wish to 'age in place', the need for informal care provided by family and friends will correspondingly continue to increase. In addition, while the need for formal (professional) care services is also likely to increase, the supply already does not meet the demand in Germany today. The aim of our study is the elicitation of people's willingness to provide informal care by means of a discrete choice experiment. The self-complete postal survey was disseminated to a random sample of the German general population in Lower Saxony. Data cleansing resulted in a final sample size of 280 participants. A conditional logit and a latent class model were estimated. All attributes were judged as highly relevant by the respondents. The results revealed that an increase in the care hours per day had the greatest negative impact overall on the willingness to provide informal care in our sample. The marginal willingness-to-accept for 1 h of informal care was €14.54 when having to provide informal care for 8 h in reference to 2 h per day. This value is considerably higher than the national minimum wage of €9.82. A three-class latent class model revealed preference heterogeneity. While a monetary compensation is often discussed to increase the willingness and availability of informal care in a country, our results show that this statement could not be generalized within our entire sample.
随着德国人口的持续老龄化，大多数老年人仍然希望“就地养老”，因此对家庭成员和朋友提供的非正式护理的需求也将相应持续增加。此外，尽管对正式（专业）护理服务的需求也可能增加，但德国目前的供应已经无法满足需求。我们的研究目的是通过离散选择实验来确定人们提供非正式护理的意愿。这项自我完成的邮寄调查在德国下萨克森州的随机抽样人群中进行。经过数据清理，最终样本量为 280 名参与者。我们估计了条件逻辑回归模型和潜在类别模型。所有属性都被受访者认为具有高度相关性。结果表明，在我们的样本中，每天的护理时间增加对提供非正式护理的意愿产生了最大的负面影响。与每天提供 2 小时护理相比，每天提供 8 小时护理的情况下，增加 1 小时非正式护理的边际接受意愿为 14.54 欧元。这个数值远远高于 9.82 欧元的德国全国最低工资。一个三类别潜在类别模型揭示了偏好异质性。虽然经常讨论用货币补偿来提高一个国家提供非正式护理的意愿和可及性，但我们的研究结果表明，这一说法并不能推广到我们的整个样本。
