Use of nursing homes by the elderly: preliminary data from the 1985 National Nursing Home Survey.

Most elderly people are not in nursing homes. Of an esti­ mated 28.5 million Americans aged 65 years and over in the United States, only 5 percent were residents of nursing homes n any given day from August 1985 through January 1986. “hisfinding from the 1985 National Nursing Home Survey (NNHS) is consistent with findings from previous National Nursing Home Surveys conducted in 1973–74 and 1977.1 In these surveys also it was found that about 5 percent of the elderly were residents of nursing homes. Differences, however, exist in the use of nursing homes by age, sex, and race subgroups. In this report, these differences in use rates are examined. DiRerences in the health and socio­ economic characteristics of elderly nursing home residents by age, sex, and race are also discussed. The health and socio­ economic characteristics examined in this report are fictional dependencies in the basic activities of daily living-bathing, dressing, using the toilet room, transferring from abed or chair, continence, and eating cognitive functioning (disorientation or memory impairment and senile dementia or chronic organic brain syndrome~ marital status at admissioq whether residents had living chMre~ living arrangements prior to admission to the nursing home; and primary source of payment at admission. The focus of this report will be a comparison of the character­ istics of the elderly who reside in nursing homes with charac­ teristics of those who reside in the community. The data presented in this report are from the 1985 Na­ tional Nursing Home Survey, a nationwide sample survey of nursing homes, their residents, discharges, and staff conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics. The survey, which ms conducted from August 1985 through January 1986, was e third of a continuing series of nursing home surveys. The first survey was conducted from August 1973 through April 1974, and the second was conducted from May through De­ cember 1977. Facilities included in the 1985 NNHS were nursing and related care homes in the conterminous United States that had three or more beds setup and staffed for use by residents and that routinely provided nursing and personal care services. A facility could be free standing or could be a nursing care unit of a hospital, retirement center, or similar institution as long as the unit maintained financial and employee records separate ffom the parent institution. Places providing only room and board were exclude~ as were places serving only persons with specific health problems (for example, mental retardation or alcoholism). The sampling frame for the 1985 NNHS consisted of the following components: