The high cost of unpaid care by young people:health and economic impacts of providing unpaid care

BACKGROUND: Many countries worldwide have experienced reductions in provision of formal long-term care services amidst rising need for care. Provision of unpaid care, meanwhile, has grown. This includes care provided by young people. Care responsibilities can affect a young people’s health, educatio...

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Autores principales: Brimblecombe, Nicola, Knapp, Martin, King, Derek, Stevens, Madeleine, Cartagena Farias, Javiera
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7409476/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32753040
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-09166-7
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author Brimblecombe, Nicola
Knapp, Martin
King, Derek
Stevens, Madeleine
Cartagena Farias, Javiera
author_facet Brimblecombe, Nicola
Knapp, Martin
King, Derek
Stevens, Madeleine
Cartagena Farias, Javiera
author_sort Brimblecombe, Nicola
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Many countries worldwide have experienced reductions in provision of formal long-term care services amidst rising need for care. Provision of unpaid care, meanwhile, has grown. This includes care provided by young people. Care responsibilities can affect a young people’s health, education and employment. We aimed to investigate the impacts on the employment and health of young people aged 16 to 25 of providing care, and the associated individual and public expenditure costs. METHODS: We examined employment, earnings and health impacts for individuals, and a range of economic impacts for society, focusing on young people aged 16 to 25 providing unpaid care in England. We applied regression analysis to data from three waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2013/2015, 2014/2016, and 2015/2017) to compare employment and health outcomes among carers and non-carers, and two-part Generalised Linear Models to estimate costs. To address potential selection bias, we then used propensity score matching methods to explore outcomes for a matched sub-sample of young adult carers who started providing care at baseline (2014/16). RESULTS: Young people aged 16 to 25 who provided care at baseline (2014/16) were less likely to be in employment, had lower earnings from paid employment, and had poorer mental and physical health at follow-up (2015/17) compared to young people of the same age who were not providing care at baseline.. There were substantial costs to the state of young adults providing care from lower tax revenue, welfare benefit payments, and health service use. In aggregate, these costs amounted to £1048 million annually in 2017. CONCLUSIONS: High individual impacts and costs to the state of providing unpaid care, and the potential of such impacts to compound existing inequalities, have many implications for policy and practice in the health, social care, employment and welfare benefits sectors. In particular, the findings reinforce the case for reducing the need for young people to provide unpaid care, for example through better provision of formal care services, and to provide ongoing support for those young people who do provide care. As impacts are seen in a number of domains, support needs to be multidimensional.
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spelling pubmed-74094762020-08-07 The high cost of unpaid care by young people:health and economic impacts of providing unpaid care Brimblecombe, Nicola Knapp, Martin King, Derek Stevens, Madeleine Cartagena Farias, Javiera BMC Public Health Research Article BACKGROUND: Many countries worldwide have experienced reductions in provision of formal long-term care services amidst rising need for care. Provision of unpaid care, meanwhile, has grown. This includes care provided by young people. Care responsibilities can affect a young people’s health, education and employment. We aimed to investigate the impacts on the employment and health of young people aged 16 to 25 of providing care, and the associated individual and public expenditure costs. METHODS: We examined employment, earnings and health impacts for individuals, and a range of economic impacts for society, focusing on young people aged 16 to 25 providing unpaid care in England. We applied regression analysis to data from three waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2013/2015, 2014/2016, and 2015/2017) to compare employment and health outcomes among carers and non-carers, and two-part Generalised Linear Models to estimate costs. To address potential selection bias, we then used propensity score matching methods to explore outcomes for a matched sub-sample of young adult carers who started providing care at baseline (2014/16). RESULTS: Young people aged 16 to 25 who provided care at baseline (2014/16) were less likely to be in employment, had lower earnings from paid employment, and had poorer mental and physical health at follow-up (2015/17) compared to young people of the same age who were not providing care at baseline.. There were substantial costs to the state of young adults providing care from lower tax revenue, welfare benefit payments, and health service use. In aggregate, these costs amounted to £1048 million annually in 2017. CONCLUSIONS: High individual impacts and costs to the state of providing unpaid care, and the potential of such impacts to compound existing inequalities, have many implications for policy and practice in the health, social care, employment and welfare benefits sectors. In particular, the findings reinforce the case for reducing the need for young people to provide unpaid care, for example through better provision of formal care services, and to provide ongoing support for those young people who do provide care. As impacts are seen in a number of domains, support needs to be multidimensional. BioMed Central 2020-08-05 /pmc/articles/PMC7409476/ /pubmed/32753040 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-09166-7 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research Article
Brimblecombe, Nicola
Knapp, Martin
King, Derek
Stevens, Madeleine
Cartagena Farias, Javiera
The high cost of unpaid care by young people:health and economic impacts of providing unpaid care
title The high cost of unpaid care by young people:health and economic impacts of providing unpaid care
title_full The high cost of unpaid care by young people:health and economic impacts of providing unpaid care
title_fullStr The high cost of unpaid care by young people:health and economic impacts of providing unpaid care
title_full_unstemmed The high cost of unpaid care by young people:health and economic impacts of providing unpaid care
title_short The high cost of unpaid care by young people:health and economic impacts of providing unpaid care
title_sort high cost of unpaid care by young people:health and economic impacts of providing unpaid care
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7409476/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32753040
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-09166-7
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