New technologies may have a beneficial impact on long-term care (LTC) systems by improving the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of LTC provision, and even by decreasing the need for LTC in the first place. Given the great uncertainty about the diffusion and implementation of available technology, there is little point in trying to make quantitative forecasts about the impact of technology. A more useful approach is to study the mechanisms through which technology can have an impact on LTC. This is the subject of Work Package 4 of the ANCIEN project.

This Policy Brief summarises findings from Work Package (WP) 5 of the ANCIEN project and its three objectives: first, collecting comprehensive information on national quality assurance policies and indicators in LTC systems in 15 EU member states; second, using the collected data to derive a typology of national systems on quality in LTC; and third, producing recommendations at all levels (European, national and local) to improve quality of LTC in Europe. The study has identified four clusters of countries based on the respective quality assurance policies and indicators.

Expected future demographic and societal shifts have put the improvement of quality and efficiency of long-term-care (LTC) systems on the agenda of virtually every EU member state, last but not least in order to support its long-term financial sustainability. Research to support the reform process, however, suffers from the scarcity of reliable and comparable data to work with, and the extent to which the process can be generalised is further complicated by large differences in the design of national LTC systems.

This Policy Brief summarises two papers prepared for the AHEAD project (WP7) focusing on the impact of death costs on health-care spending. The papers reviewed the empirical literature on health economics, presenting the main results obtained by studies on the interaction among age, proximity to death and health-care expenditure. Besides, they provide estimates of health expenditure by ‘distance from birth’ (i.e. age) and by ‘distance from death’ (i.e. the health expenditure incurred in the last period of life) in different parts of Italy.

This paper was prepared as Work Package IV of the AHEAD project – Ageing, Health Status and the Determinants of Health Expenditure – which has received financing from the European Commission under the 6th Research Framework Programme. The purpose of this work package was to build up a picture of the movements in health status of the elderly population of each country in the EU by age and sex. Residential care and death were considered as well as states of health.