Aging & Social Change: Eleventh Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

In principle, Austria’s family hospice care leave, implemented in 2002, is great. If you want to spend three to six months with a dying close relative or a seriously ill child, all you have to do is tell your employer five days in advance, and you’ll receive around 55 % of your net income, your pension and health insurances are taken care of, and you cannot be immediately fired upon your return to work. And yet only around 1,000 people (predominantly women) make use of this option. Our research project has focused on the reasons for the surprisingly low uptake in Austria, and we have tried to identify best-practice examples regarding end-of-life care (particularly for family members) in other European and overseas countries. We haven’t been conducting this research for scientific reasons only. Since this project has been commissioned by a policy-orientated institution our goal is to propose a EU directive on the politics of grief.