Rethinking Long-Term Care: Professional Cultures, Care Inequities and the Future of Care

Long-term care (LTC) is undergoing profound change as population ageing, longer lives with chronic conditions and evolving family structures place increasing pressure on care systems. Reforms promoting integrated care, community-based services and support for informal carers are reshaping the organisation of services across countries. However, LTC debates continue to focus largely on financing, service provision and workforce capacity, while giving less attention to the cultural processes through which care is understood, organised and valued. Professional cultures, institutional norms and social expectations influence how dependency, autonomy, ageing and responsibility are defined, shaping policies and everyday practices. They also affect the emergence and persistence of inequities linked to gender, socioeconomic position, migration, ethnicity, disability and place of residence. Investigating these relationships can help explain why similar reforms produce different outcomes and identify pathways towards more equitable and inclusive systems.This Research Topic aims to examine how professional cultures, institutional settings and social expectations shape the organisation, delivery and experience of long-term care. It seeks to explore how physicians and other healthcare professionals, policymakers, care workers, family carers and older people define good care, negotiate responsibilities and influence the distribution of authority and resources. Contributions may address how professional identities and organisational norms reproduce or challenge inequities, how different forms of knowledge inform decision-making, and how reforms affect diverse groups across welfare and care systems. The Research Topic will foster interdisciplinary dialogue across medicine, public health, gerontology, sociology and policy studies, while identifying approaches that support person-centred, culturally responsive and socially just LTC.To gather further insights into the cultural organisation of long-term care and its implications for equity, we welcome contributions examining diverse professional, institutional, social and policy contexts, including comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:• Professional cultures and the social construction of long-term care.• Physicians and other healthcare professionals as cultural agents.• Care inequities across welfare systems and institutional settings.• Gender, migration, intersectionality and inequalities in long-term care.• Professional identities, organisational cultures and multidisciplinary collaboration.• Informal carers, paid care workers and workforce transformation.• Ethical, cultural and social dimensions of ageing, dependency and autonomy.• The roles and experiences of older people, families and care workers.• Integrated care, community-based services and changing care models.• Policy implementation, institutional change and the future of long-term care.• Comparative and cross-national approaches to care systems and reform.We welcome original research articles, systematic reviews, scoping reviews, policy analyses, theoretical and conceptual papers, perspectives and case studies. Topic editors: Giovanni Lamura, Georgia Casanova, Francesca Degiuli Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85639/rethinking-long-term-care-professional-cultures-care-inequities-and-the-future-of-care