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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Aging and Public Health
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1456320
This article is part of the Research Topic The Formal and Informal Workforce for a Global Aging Population View all articles

Projected number of people in need for long-term care in Germany until 2050

Provisionally accepted
Luisa Haß Luisa Haß 1*Stephanie Knippschild Stephanie Knippschild 2Thaddäus Tönnies Thaddäus Tönnies 3Annika Hoyer Annika Hoyer 4Rebecca Palm Rebecca Palm 5,6Sabrina Voß Sabrina Voß 2Ralph Brinks Ralph Brinks 2,3
  • 1 Lehrstuhl für Medizinische Biometrie und Epidemiologie Department Humanmedizin Fakultät für Gesundheit der Universität Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany
  • 2 Faculty of Health/School of Medicine, Chair for Medical Biometry and Epidemiology, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany, Witten, Germany
  • 3 Institute for Biometrics and Epidemiology, German Diabetes Center (DDZ), Duesseldorf, Germany
  • 4 Medical School OWL, Biostatistics and Medical Biometry, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany, Bielefeld, Germany
  • 5 Department of Health Service Research, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany, Oldenburg, Germany
  • 6 Faculty of Health/School of Nursing Science, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany, Witten, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Introduction: Current demographic trends predict continuously growing numbers of individuals reliant on care, which has to be accounted for in future planning of long-term careresources. The projection of developments becomes especially necessary in order to enable healthcare systems to cope with this future burden and to implement suitable strategies to deal with the demand of long-term care. This study aimed to project the prevalence of long-term care and the number of care-dependent people in Germany until 2050.Methods: We used the illness-death model to project the future prevalence of long-term care in Germany until 2050 considering eight different scenarios. Therefore, transition rates (incidence rate and mortality rates) describing the illness-death model are needed, which have been studied recently. Absolute numbers of people in need for long-term care were calculated based to the 15th population projection of the Federal Statistical Office.Results: Numbers of people in need for long-term care will increase by at least 12%, namely 5.6 million people, in the period of 2021 until 2050. Assuming an annual incidence-increase of 2% from 2021 to 2050 the number of care-dependent individuals could potentially rise up to 14 million (+180%).Conclusions: Our projections indicated a substantial rise in the number of care-dependent individuals. This is expected to lead to raising economic challenges as well as a stronger demand for healthcare and nursing personnel.

    Keywords: Epidemiology, Chronic condition, Aging, Illness-death model, Long-Term Care, Partial differential equation, Aggregated data

    Received: 28 Jun 2024; Accepted: 09 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Haß, Knippschild, Tönnies, Hoyer, Palm, Voß and Brinks. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Luisa Haß, Lehrstuhl für Medizinische Biometrie und Epidemiologie Department Humanmedizin Fakultät für Gesundheit der Universität Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany

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