| Abstract: | Due to population aging, the increase of long-term care demands and the idea of “aging in place”, the demands for home care grows rapidly. Thus, the reasonable valuation of home care became the important issue. This research tried to use the idea of Activity-based Costing to explore the principal cost factors of home care, calculate the cost of home care and compare the the difference between the cities and countries. The research targets referred to 15 home care service centers in Taichung City and Changhua County. There were 15 questionnaries distributed and 10 returned. The return rate was 66.67 %. Among 10 home care service centers receiving the survey of this research, five of them were in urban area and the other five were in countryside (50%, 50%).
As to the research tools, the researchers managed the structural questionnaire to collect the data, including two sections. The first section was “survey of resource costs in home care service center” which collected the cost data in the home care service center; the second part was “survey of resource consumption of home care activities” which collected the resource consumption situation of 115 service cases in home care service centers receiving the survey. The content of the investigation mainly treated 6 home care services (household work service, document service, recreational service, medical service, physical care service and other service) as the cost objects and investigate the data of the related cost factors. The researcher further used descriptive statistics, t-test and One-way ANOVA for data analysis.
The research showed that age was unrelated to the cost objects such as household work service, physical care service, document service, recreational service, medical service and blood pressure measurement; the higher the disabled degree was, the higher the household work service cost was; the more the diseases were, the higher the physical care service cost was; the more the disabled items of IADLs and ADLs were, the higher the costs of household work service and physical care service were.
The research used the independent sample t to test the difference between urban service center and country home care service center in terms of cost drivers and cost objects; the statistical result found out that the office cost in urban area was higher than that in the country area; the household work service cost, document service cost, recreational service cost, medical service cost physical care service cost and other cost (blood pressure measurement) in urban area were more than those in country area.
The samples in this research only included 10 home care service centers and the home care cost literatures published in the past applied Activity-based Costing by case study. Thus, the result of this research was regarded as the initial step. We expect that this research can function as the reference for the managers in home care service centers when controlling the cost and for future long-term care financial planning. |
