From the Costs of Caring to Care Justice: Valuing, Supporting, and Sustaining Older Adult Care

Population ageing is intensifying the global demand for long-term care, chronic disease management, dementia support, disability assistance, and community-based services. Our previous Research Topic (“The Costs of Caring for Older Adults”) foregrounded the economic, social, and mental health burdens of care, including caregiver strain, health-system pressure, access disparities, technological innovations, and intergenerational tensions. This follow-up volume moves beyond documenting who experiences care burden toward examining how care responsibilities are valued, distributed, financed, and governed. Thus, in this Research Topic, care justice refers to the fair recognition, distribution, financing, and governance of care responsibilities across families, communities, markets, and states. As formal long-term care systems remain unevenly developed, families continue to absorb much of the care burden, and this work — disproportionately performed by women — is routinely undervalued or invisible in economic accounting. Older adult care is therefore a public health concern that shapes poverty, gender inequality, labor participation, social protection, and health-system sustainability.This Research Topic addresses a central gap in scholarship on ageing and public health: the insufficient integration of economic, ethical, and policy perspectives on who bears the costs of older adult care and how these costs can be shared more equitably. Rather than asking what care costs or how caregivers experience their role, this collection asks who carries those costs, whose care work remains invisible or unrecognized, and how societies can build fairer systems of support. We invite contributions that examine hidden and unpaid care work, financial toxicity, gendered and intergenerational distribution of care burden, elder vulnerability to abuse and economic exploitation, long-term care financing, and the role of public systems in supporting families and care workers. The goal is to generate evidence for culturally responsive and sustainable care systems by encouraging studies that measure and value unpaid labor, examine social protection and long-term care financing and policy, assess integrated or community-based care models through an equity lens, and evaluate how digital innovations affect who benefits and who is left out.Submissions should address care justice in older adult care through one or more of the following sub-themes:1. Valuing unpaid caregiving labor and hidden care costs.2. Gender, family structure, and the unequal distribution of intergenerational care burden.3. Financial toxicity among older adults, families, and caregivers.4. Elder abuse, neglect, economic exploitation, and structural vulnerability in care arrangements.5. Older adult care justice in low- and middle-income countries, rural communities, and underrepresented populations.6. Policy models that redistribute the burden of unpaid and family-based care fairly through long-term care financing, subsidies, and caregiver support.7. We also welcome studies on the financing and governance of dementia, multimorbidity, disability, palliative care, and home- or community-based care, as well as economic evaluations of digital care models and workforce support policy, provided the analysis centers on equity, valuation, or distribution of care responsibility rather than caregiver experience alone. Topic editors: Lawrence Ejike Ugwu, Janine White, Andreea Claudia Serban Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85979/from-the-costs-of-caring-to-care-justice-valuing-supporting-and-sustaining-older-adult-care