Many governments stress the importance of “learning from abroad”. An analysis of official documents over a period of some 20 years examines learning from abroad in the case of funding long-term care in England through the lens of prospective policy transfer.
The paper analyses the eight “official” documents in England that examined funding LTC from 1999 to 2019. It uses interpretive content analysis in a deductive approach that focuses on both manifest and latent content.
Only four of the eight documents gave more than a token level of attention to other nations, and of the remaining four, none fully satisfied the criteria or followed the recommendations of prospective policy transfer. Moreover, a rather limited pool of lessons from other nations is examined. Much of the material is rather descriptive, with limited explicit attention towards goals, problems, settings and policy performance, and a clear recommendation explicitly associated with a clear lesson or policy recommendation is rare.
This is the first analysis of the eight official documents that have discussed funding long-term care in England.
