How many elderly people live in nursing homes in Spain?

Eventhough news outlets and social networks publish data about the number of nursing homes and people living in them, as of March 2021 there are no reliable statistics on the population who live in care homes in Spain.  There are some data that describes different dwellings where older people live but they don’t refer exactly to nursing homes.

During 2020 the Covid-19  health emergency led to a high number of deaths among the elderly, specially those living in care homes.

This terrible event has highlighted the scarce and scattered information and the general lack of knowledge about life in care homes, very close to a general social, political and health neglect, which has unnecessarily damaged the image and the good work of most of these institutions and the staff who work in them.

Envejecimientoenred, a web site that deals with elder statistics, tried to fill the gap publishing a report in mid 2020. 

They estimated that on average 322,180 people aged 65 and over live in nursing homes. The number of nursing home places is 372,985, according to our database; we set the average occupancy rate at 86%. If persons under 65 who also live in nursing homes are included, the figure would be 333,920 persons.

The population aged 80 and over accounts for 79% of the entire population living in residential homes, whose average age as a whole has risen from 85 to 86 between 2011 and 2019.

A comparison of the age structure of the residential population with that of the general population shows an almost symmetrically inverse structure to that of the elderly population living in family dwellings. 



This over-aged structure implies a higher probability of finding very old people in residential care homes; it assumes proximity and face-to-face interaction between them; they are likely to be more frail and with more limitations in activities of daily living, with mobility problems and other disabilities and chronic pathologies; the older they are, the more problems they have.

Therefore, high occupancy rates, strong over-ageing and high probability of physical (and cognitive) decline mean that the population living in elderly care homes is at higher risk of health emergencies, such as the one caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has a very marked age-specific death structure A warning sign of a possible new wave of this disease, or a new epidemic, or emergencies of any kind.


Read the text that was the base for this post (in Spainsh)

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