Lifetime Use of Nursing Home Care

Abstract

Despite the growth in the number of Americans in nursing homes, there are only limited data on the total amount of time that people spend in such facilities. We estimate the amount of time the average person spends in nursing homes over his or her lifetime (lifetime nursing home use), using data from the National Mortality Followback Survey of the next of kin of a sample of persons 25 years of age or older who died in 1986. On the basis of these data, we estimated the likelihood that Americans will use nursing home care during the course of their lifetimes and the total duration of such care. Current data on life expectancy were then used to reweight the sample to project lifetime nursing home use for those who became 65 years old in 1990.