eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

Objectives of the Study:

This study aims to find out senior home care markets and possibilities for home care production in Finland. The main objective of the thesis is to find out what kind of population and age demography is needed in certain area or location that a general elderly care home service concept is financially effective from operator's perspective. In order to get big picture clear the objective studied with a general home care service production model, which also shows the basic tasks of home care service operations. The specific objectives were to first find out how many customers per caregiver per day there should be on average that the home care service production would be financially feasible. In order to find out this, another objective is to develop a home care service model that can be used as a basis for the analysis. Tasks, prices and potential customers for the home care must be analyzed with mathematical model that gives results what are the specific customer amounts and potential city sizes for home care business. Another main objective was to find out what is the population density that on average contains enough customers for home care service population. Using home care service model's tasks and prices a mathematical analysis will be done about the needed customer amounts and population density break even levels in the home care service production in order to have financially feasible home care production possibilities.

Academic background and methodology:

In order to test the senior home care service concept with proven data this research used business evaluation framework (Haslam, 2005) implemented in the senior home care industry in Finland. This framework would be feasible for this kind of case based evaluation that would be first descriptive and then testing the defined service model with outside data and then gain actual results from the evaluation process. Haslam's framework was supported by business evaluation framework review (Aguilar-Saven, 2004) that basically consisted of same elements in order to observe the business case's functionality and profitability. In order to analyze and understand the viability of a certain business concept, in this case the home care service production's profitability and testing requirements, the business process modeling has to be made and after that the business process can be tested. As a conclusion from the framework review the selected framework for this study is a combination of descriptive diagrams for structured analysis (DFD) that gives detailed view of the entity and rich pictures that is about making a framework with contextual representation of things. These techniques form a framework that shows that the flow of business process and explains the business entity's working. It is easy to understand, verify and it shows the contextual meaning of the elements that are described.

Findings and conclusions:

In the research it was found out that there should be on average at least 3,2 customers per day per home care service person that the care service production would be financially profitable. This was leading to further observation that in Finland the average distance between daily customers on the home care service route should be approximately 2,5 kilometers or less, otherwise the time and costs related to logistics would be too much. This led to practical result that in general with service model used in this research all the major big and medium sized cities having people more than 15.000 and population density being approximately 20 or more people per square kilometer would be enough to contain needed customer amount in a selected area.

Keywords: Senior care, home care, senior business, senior markets, service business, break even customer levels, population density, service feasibility, ageing, seniors in Finland, senior services, age demography