Predictors of professional and non-professional community care for care-dependent adults

The increasing number of elderly people in most industrialized countries makes reforms in health care necessary. However, knowledge of factors that determine the use of care is scarce. The study described in this article focuses on predictors of the diversity of professional and non-professional care used by care-dependent adults who live in the community. A group of 177 care-dependent adults was identified by means of a large scale telephone survey in the Dutch community of Tegelen. Potential predictors of the diversity of professional and non-professional care were derived from Andersen's Behavioral Model of Health Services [4,5] and Litwak's Task Specifity Model [12]. Both models proved to be valuable for the explanation of variance in the diversity of care. Potential predictors derived from the two models could account for 21% of the variance for total care, 25% of the variance for professional care, and 34% of the variance for non-professional care.