Societal Aging and Health Care Systems

Abstract

Personnel shortage will become a major public health problem in many countries in the near future, and one of the main causes of this problem is societal aging (Burke et al., 2013). The goal of this study is to discover the effect and the future affordability of societal aging on health care systems across the OECD, to investigate which policies are needed to overcome this problem and to shed new light on new debates of new policies. A model-based policy analysis using a multi-region dynamic modeling method has been performed to reach this
goal. In this research, a stakeholder analysis is executed to examine which stakeholders are involved in the decision making process concerning societal aging. Furthermore, a system dynamics model is built which represents the health care systems across the OECD. Within this model, four policies have been tested to examine which policies are suited to be implemented
to close the future gap between the health supply and the health demand. The first policy is the automation-policy, which decreases the administrative tasks of nurses, through technological advancements. The second policy that is tested is the eHealth-policy, which supports health care institutions to make use of eHealth applications. The third policy is the additional-students-policy, which calculates the inflow of nursing students using the gap of needed nurses. The last policy is the euthanasia-policy, which helps people suffering from dementia to commit euthanasia. The results of the research show a decrease in the gap between the demand for health care and the health care supply when the policies are implemented. The implementation of the additional-students-policy performs best in terms of closing the gap, but the costs of this implementation are high. Therefore governments should make trade-offs between the costs
and the quality of health care. However, these trade-offs may include ethical dilemmas like the example of the committing-euthanasia-policy.