Restructuring long-term care and the geography of ageing: A view from rural New Zealand

This paper examines the major points of contact between the restructuring of long-term care and the evolving geography of the elderly in the Waikato, one of New Zealandʹs agricultural heartlands. The time frame of the study is 1981–1991, a decade in which new Zealand embarked on a sweeping program of service restructuring and privatization. Comparative analysis of data on the evolving distribution of the elderly and on the shifting supply of long-term care beds reveals that restructuring has sharpened contrasts between urban and rural contexts for ageing. Almost all the urban centres in the Waikato benefited from an expansion of long-term care driven by private-sector initiatives, while rural communities suffered a broad-based depletion of services. However, the data indicate that, contrary to the trend in long-term care, more older elderly people (defined as those aged 80 or older) are ‘staying on’ in rural communities. The paper concludes with a consideration of emergent policy issues; we speculate that it through the aggregate outcomes of decisions to ‘stay on’ that the personal troubles of the elderly residents of service-depleted communities may yet become an important policy issue in rural New Zealand.