Informal Care and Informal Caregivers in the Social Care System from a Perspective of the Involved Actors

This thesis elaborates on the issue of informal care. By this term is meant a situation when a person who is dependent on somebody else's care receives this care from someone close, most often a family member of the dependent person. This type of care has been existing for a very long time but lately it has became a more frequently discussed topic and got higher attention in general. This thesis is focused on the process of increasing interest in the informal care by the public policy process towards informal care and caregivers. The main effort is put into identification of the most important events in history, actors and their mutual modes of interactions which are happening during the whole process as the rationale behind the basic line of evolution of position of the informal care and caregivers in the system of long term care. The thesis concludes that the reason for escalation of the interest in the informal care is an outcome of concurrent effort of few key actors who use different strategies for reaching their goals. On one hand, there are the European Union and the Czech Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs as the most important actors whose significant position in the whole policy creation process is given by the institutional setting. On the other hand, there are the caregivers who very..