ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on long-term care, which includes primarily care for the elderly, the handicapped, and psychiatric patients, all of whom need lasting and frequent (daily) intensive attention. It presents a historical overview of the introduction of quality standards in Danish eldercare and Dutch home care. The chapter shows how reform—in this case the fundamental, intended, and enforced national policy on quality care—was achieved. It describes the course of events in detail in order to identify what facilitated the reform. The chapter explores the introduction of quality control systems in Denmark and the Netherlands, and presents possible barriers to reform. It explains these theoretical assumptions with the empirical data to determine how and to what extent they truly affected the reform processes in the long-term care sector of Denmark and the Netherlands. The chapter discusses paradigms to act as barriers hampering the introduction of quality standards.
