Montserrat Gas, director of the Institute for Advanced Family Studies, and Francesco Marcaletti, a researcher in the IsFamily Santander Chair, took part as speakers in the congress held to commemorate the 260th anniversary of the Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, which was held in Moscow on 31 May and 1 June.
In her talk “Older Adults Dependency, Nursing Care and Family Relationships.The Role of Intergenerational Solidarity”, which also featured Faculty of Law lecturer Belén Zárate, Gas analysed the results of the research project “Older Parents, Generations and Family Solidarity”, in light of the Dependency Law that has been in place in Spain since 2006. This research, which addresses all aspects of intergenerational solidarity in Spain, is based on a multi-level analysis performed with samples from 600 people with living children aged 65 to 74.
One of the study’s main conclusions, based on a representative sample of the Spanish population, is the observation that elderly people with a limited family network are at greater risk of dependency and social exclusion.
In an effort to address the growing rate of dependency, the study recommends encouraging stable family ties and confirms the need to recognise and promote the family as the natural setting for person care.
Sechenov University, one of the leading institutions in the field of Health Sciences in Russia, recently signed a collaboration agreement with the Institute for Advanced Family Studies at UIC Barcelona to repeat the study in Russia. The leader for the russian project is Kasimovskaya Nataliya, Associate Professor and Head of the Department of nursing management and social work activities (Sechenov First MSMU MON Russia). As part of this research project, a comparative study on the situation in Russia and Spain is due to be presented by the year 2020.
The studies promoted by the IsFamilySantander Chair consider the family the ideal environment for the transfer of intergenerational resources and focus on three fundamental aspects that constitute, in turn, the Chair’s main lines of research: economy, health and care and education.
