AUPIK - Maintaining home care infrastructures in disasters

Due to demographic change, the number of people in need of care has been steadily growing for years. While in 1999, 2.02 million people were in need of care, by the end of 2015, the number had risen to 2.86 million. Home care carries the biggest workload within the care sector. For the majority of all people in need for care, their relatives support them in their home environments. However, home care is becoming increasingly professionalised, which is why infrastructure for home care becomes ever more important. However, home care is structured based on a well-functioning day-to-day routine. As long as daily routines remain intact, outpatient care services provide for care at home, while disturbances of such routines (for instance, power outages, floodwaters, pandemics) pose great challenges. In such states of emergency, care measures structurally are the responsibility of disaster control units. Units of disaster control, however, are insufficiently prepared to tend to the needs of a significant number of people in need of care, indicating a gap in healthcare provision for vulnerable groups in society during a state of emergency.

AUPIK therefore starts at the intersection of the work of home care services and structures of disaster control. Ultimately, AUPIK aims at strengthening the resilience of home care infrastructures in situations of crisis and disaster. Hereby, arrangements for care at home are to be upheld as long as possible, so that people can remain in familiar environments – even in case of disaster. In the event that this goal is not achievable at one point, AUPIK further researches organisational possibilities for a temporal centralisation of home care in form of a temporary intensive care unit. For this purpose, concrete policy recommendations, as well as educational material and support concepts for disaster protection and care services will be developed and distributed. 

In the context of AUPIK, the IZEW focuses on the resilience of infrastructures of home care, as well as the relation of organisational and personal resilience. Furthermore, questions of security ethics are considered and developed as they arise within the scope of the project. As coordinator of the research project, the IZEW organises the integration of the research provided by each of the project partners into an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary frame of reference.