Who uses and who needs informal care support? Quantitative evidence from the Dutch informal care monitor

To meet the increasing demand for long-term care it is important to stimulate informal care and retain current caregivers. In the Netherlands, the government aims to do so by providing informal care support, for example, by offering respite care. However, often these support services seem to remain underused.

This study investigates characteristics of caregivers and caregiving relationships associated with use of and need for informal care support.

We use cross-sectional data for the years 2014, 2016 and 2019 from the Informal Care Monitor of The Netherlands Institute for Social Research regarding 9000 informal caregivers. We regressed the (i) use of and (ii) unmet need for informal care support on a wide range of characteristics.

About 30% of the studied informal caregivers report to use some support, whereas a similar share indicates to need (more) support. We find that both use of and unmet need for support were associated with need-related factors such as hours of informal care provision and the type of caregiving relationship. For example, individuals providing more than ten weekly hours of care were more likely to report unmet need. Also several non-need related variables were associated with use and unmet need. Females for example were less likely to use support, whilst working and lower-income carers more often reported unmet need.

We observe that both need and non-need related characteristics relate to unmet needs for support. To keep caregiving sustainable, support could be targeted to those subgroups most often reporting unmet need.