🔹Methodological considerations

The Guide makes strong conceptual use of certain definitions. It is important that at the beginning of the project, the work team knows the definitions of the concepts, and determines the scope of the implementation.

Definition of care

The objective of the Guide is to measure the care services required and offered according to the population of the locality. What is meant by caregiving services depends on the scope of the definition of caregiving used.

Caregiving is a term that characterises the actions necessary for sustaining the quality of life of persons who, because of their age, health, or abilities, have some difficulty sustaining it on their own. Care, for the purposes of this guide, is divided into self-care, which comprises the infrastructures and services that enable people to move toward independence, and caregiving, which characterises the relationships between caregivers and the people being cared for. If our definition of care includes care services between caregivers and cared-for persons, our system of indicators will include nursing services, hospices, day care centres, and others that involve this relationship between people.

If our definition of care includes care services between caregivers and cared-for persons, our system of indicators will include nursing services, hospices, day care centres, and others that involve this relationship between people. If our definition includes self-care, we can measure all those programs and infrastructures that enable people to care for themselves.

For example, in the case of persons with motor disabilities, all those facilities that have universal accessibility infrastructure in public spaces, such as ramps, elevators or more, promote the mobility of older adults with mobility difficulties. The existence of spaces or recreational or leisure programs aimed at some of the priority populations, such as parks with specialised equipment for children, adolescents, older adults or people with disabilities, is measured as part of the supply of care services that contribute to the mental and social health of these populations, and to socialising the family burden of care.

Age Range Disaggregation for Children and Adolescents and Older Adults

This guide seeks to disaggregate the care groups into age groups, recognizing that there are concepts such as the stages of childhood (e.g., early childhood, second childhood, adolescence), as well as different stages of old age that allow us to disaggregate the types of care that each sector of the population requires. A 65-year-old does not have the same needs, statistically speaking, as a 95-year-old. Nor does a 1-year-old child have the same needs as a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old.

While these definitions rest on theoretical bases of care and individual development, we have not given specific recommendations in this Guide on how to divide age groups, since the demographic or census office in each country, or the social welfare offices, are the ones who determine how age groups are disaggregated.

During the first stage of the project it is necessary to use a uniform definition of how to distribute these groups. For this purpose, we recommend using the definition of the national statistical office or the office in charge of conducting the censuses, and using that distribution for all indicators. For example, in Mexico they are disaggregated by five years. For children 0-5, 6-10 and 11-15. For old age, they are usually determined simply from age 60 or 65, so the team decided to disaggregate the age ranges into five-year ranges for the data sets that allowed it.

Disaggregation on types of disability

Just as the needs of a newborn are different from those of a 10-year-old child, so are the needs of people with disabilities. For the guide, the aim is to find instruments that measure people by their type of disability and to find the supply and demand of services related to the type of disability. Likewise, these factors will be related to the degree of dependence for daily life, where, for example, a person with a high degree of motor disability will have a higher level of dependence than a person with a hearing disability.

The types of disability are also usually determined by the census or statistical offices operating at the country level. We recommend resting on these definitions since the design of public programs often uses them.

As an example, some types of disaggregation of disabilities would be: Visual, Hearing, Mobility, Cognitive, Cognitive, Autonomy, Expressive, Mental.

Recommendations when locally adapting the guide

In the first review of the indicators, conducted during the kick-off phase of the project, the team should review the definitions and note when some data or information in the project might not match the locality and resolve the differences. For example, some types of services might not exist in the locality, while the guide itself may not contain the services that are offered. Depending on the relevance to the project, a decision should be made to work at the municipal, departmental or provincial level, and then align the disaggregation of the indicators to the geographic level of interest. As a general rule having a greater granularity, for example, at the neighbourhood level instead of disaggregating at the departmental or provincial level, allows us to better determine whether any sector of the locality is more underserved and any other is over-supplied, so granularity is welcomed.

We recommend that during the kick-off and consolidation stages, the team feels free to adjust the definitions to the locality as much as necessary, with the objective of having a system of indicators that provides the greatest amount of information for decision making.