Bressé, Sophie <br/><br/>
A Necessary Professionalization of Home Care for the Elderly 

 -  2003.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> The number of dependent old people is rising and will continue to increase rapidly over the coming years. By offering help with domestic tasks and with personal hygiene if necessary, home care is a vital service for enabling old people who so wish – the majority of the elderly population – to continue living in their own homes. However, to address the increase in demand, the services on offer will need to be developed, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. Indeed, care for the dependent elderly calls for special skills and ever higher levels of service quality are expected by their families. Results of surveys of home care services and their personnel by Sapad-Structures and of elderly beneficiaries by Sapad-Bénéficiaires offered a means to compare beneficiaries’ expectations with the characteristics of home care personnel: home carers have very few qualifications, or none at all, while the elderly beneficiaries are increasingly old and fragile, and often psychologically, physically and/or mentally dependent. In the 1980s, measures to promote the home care sector (primarily targeting the elderly, but also other population categories) in fact had a dual objective: to enable elderly people to live at home while at the same time creating jobs for unqualified people. Today, the ageing of our population, i.e., the growing number of old people, but also their increasing age and hence their growing level of dependence, calls for a professionalization of the home care sector, even if the cost of paying for qualified personnel is high.