Due to demographic change, Slovenia is facing the important challenge of how to provide care for the elderly and ensure their quality of life. Social home care is a service for elderly people who wish to remain in their home for as long as possible. In this article, we analyse the quality of social home care as perceived by the users of social home care. We applied the model for evaluating access to services developed by Penchansky and Thomas (1981; 1984). The analysis is based on the first representative survey of users of social home care (2013). Employing the hierarchical clustering method we identified three groups of users who have different perceptions of the quality of social home care, namely those very satisfied with care, those dissatisfied with the price of social home care, and those dissatisfied with social home care. Through multinomial regression analysis we discovered that very satisfied users differ from dissatisfied ones (with price) in their income, the price of the care they are paying, and unfulfilled needs. Dissatisfied users are those with intensive use of social home care, high levels of need, health problems and receiving care from large organisations.
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