The dynamics of specialised housing construction in a time of human resource shortages in long-term care services

Abstract

Human resources for long-term care (LTC) systems and funding to produce appropriate facilities for long-term care requirements are in limited supply all over Europe. These two shortages are especially noticeable in rural locations, where the human resources required for the care of senior citizens are not as readily available, and demand is increasing rapidly. According to Feng's paper on the fuzziness of travel-to-work areas (TTWAs), the fuzzy set method and the CURDS approach (fuzzy evaluation of travel-to/work areas), enriched with the results of the gravity model, can be used to evaluate labour shortages and suggest the action to attract new caregivers. Governmental organisations and educational research institutions have extensively used TTWAs but have never combined them with a GM to attract new workers. This research aims to examine the fuzziness of commute-to-work zones and improve this feature by adding housing and salary elements to the gravity model as attractors for optimal dynamics. In the article, we demonstrate how, given limited funding and shortage of public building space, we can choose between investing in new LTC facilities and providing human resources for care. By investing in long-term care community houses and providing sufficient human resources, we show how to meet the demands of the LTC while adhering to demographic projections through goal programming. To schedule the necessary dynamics of the construction of the specialised housing units for older residents spread out across municipalities in a functional region, the fuzzy assessment of human resource availability in the Local Action Group (LAG) Haloze in Slovenia is presented. From this, the necessary dynamics of production of housing units for LTC residents and recruiting new staff are estimated, with a minimal inventory of unused units.