Project summary:

The aim of this comparative project is to understand how the Covid-19 crisis, by revealing and exacerbating a tension around the work of home care, has transformed the legal and social frameworks of this work and the employment relationships it implies. It will compare five European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and the UK) to analyse how all the issues that have emerged during the crisis were solved and sometimes reveal deeper tensions. The project focuses on policies concerning home care for older people. In France, it will bring together a study on decision making in the social dialogue and public polices at the level of the national social partners, national administration. This analysis of elite’s actions will dialogue with an ethnographic study at the level of the employers, care beneficiaries and the public. The project will analyse how the conflicts and uncertainties around care work employment relations were solved.

Project summary:

The Mc-COVID 19 project is set to analyse the socio-sanitary co-ordination procedures in the context of institutionalized older-age care (age group that appears particularly vulnerable in this epidemic context), in Spain as well as in the rest of the EU-15. This study focuses on the articulation of resources between health and social policies, and aim to contribute to improve the effectiveness of the decision-making process and crucial aspects in the fight against the pandemic. To better understand what happened in these centres and facilitate policy learning, this study identifies the difficulties faced by institutional actors and nursing homes’ managers between January and August 2020. To this end, the research team conducted 25 in-depth interviews with managers in such centres (directors, administrators, and medical supervisors) in various Spanish regions (Comunidades Autónomas). In addition, the research group interviewed high-ranking officials responsible for both social services and public healthcare at the central and regional levels, and representatives of the trade unions and the employers’ associations of the nursing homes. Furthermore, the team examined documents issued by governmental and independent sources, together with the results of a survey elaborated by the Institute for the Older-age and Social Services (IMSERSO) of the Ministry of Health. Findings aim to be useful to inform other public policy sectors involved in crisis-related situations.