PREDICTORS OF PROFESSIONAL AND NONPROFESSIONAL COMMUNITY CARE FOR CARE-DEPENDENT ADULTS

The increasing number of elderly people in most industrialized countri es makes reforms in health care necessary. However, knowledge of facto rs that determine the use of care is scarce. The study described in th is article focuses on predictors of the diversity of professional and non-professional care used by care-dependent adults who live in the co mmunity. A group of 177 care-dependent adults was identified by means of a large scale telephone survey in the Dutch community of Tegelen. P otential predictors of the diversity of professional and non-professio nal care were derived from Andersen's Behavioral Model of Health Servi ces [4,5] and Litwak's Task Specifity Model [12]. Both models proved t o be valuable for the explanation of variance in the diversity of care . Potential predictors derived from the two models could account for 2 1% of the variance for total care, 25% of the variance for professiona l care, and 34% of the variance for non-professional care.