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Sammanfattning

For elderly patients, good coordination of care is particularly important, since they often need health care and care services at different administrative levels. In cases where the elder’s own resources are insufficient, because of poor health and often weakened cognitive ability, the resources of relatives (spouse or children) are potentially important. The Norwegian Care Coordination reform, introduced in 2012, may have altered the role of spouse and off-spring. On the one hand, the reform is intended to improve coordination and strengthen formal care at the primary care level, on the other hand, reform effects such as shorter hospital length of stay may increase the demand for informal care. In this analysis, we investigate the relationship between family resources and mortality and hospital readmission for patients aged 70 and above who have had an emergency hospital admission. The analysis benefits from data from The Norwegian Patient Register, merged with data from Statistics Norway and KOSTRA. Our results show that having a spouse and/or an adult child is negatively associated with mortality and positively associated with being readmitted to hospital within 30 days. The analysis does not indicate that the Care Coordination reform has altered the relationship between family resources and mortality or readmission.

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