Moving in and out of public old age care among the

Authors: Daniel Hallberg Mårten Lagergren

Publish Date: 2009/04/07

Volume: 6, Issue: 2, Pages: 137-145

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Abstract

In this paper we present empirical results for the very old 75+ concerning transitions between independent living in ordinary home without public support independent living in ordinary home or special accommodations with home help and home health care and living in around the clock care We investigate the role of age and gender dependency in activities of daily living ADL and the informal support from a partner We also study mortality conditional on the abovementioned variables and on the mode of old age care The results show that the propensity to move to a more intensive mode of care is less for males higher with more limitations in personal ADL and increasing with age There is also a stabilizing effect of the availability of informal care support as measured by marriage or cohabitation as it makes it less likely to move from the current care mode In the case of mortality the observed relations pointed in the expected directions—mortality increasing with increasing PADLlimitations and age and being higher for men than for women The age relation however does not hold in the same way in around the clock care The estimated relationships are used as input in a microsimulation model intended for analysis of the effect of population aging on the needs and resource requirements for old age care in SwedenWe are grateful for comments and suggestions from Björn Lindgren Anders Klevmarken Lennart Flood Kristian Bolin Urban Fransson Matias Eklöf and two anonomous referees Financial support from the Swedish council for working life and social research FAS is gratefully acknowledged

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