Life table methods for assessing the dynamics of U.S. nursing home utilization: 1976-1977.

One likely consequence of the aging of the U.S. population is the growth of the number of persons in nursing homes. As the numbers of persons in nursing homes increase so will the amount of resources required to keep them in those homes. This will make it increasingly important to understand the dynamics of nursing home utilization so that we can more effectively plan the allocation of resources. Unfortunately, we lack direct information on the dynamics of nursing home utilization both because of the expense of implementing longitudinal studies to gather such information and because the available data on current residents are inappropriate to study the dynamics of utilization because of several types of bias. Demographic methods are presented that can be applied to survey data to remove sample biases from the data and permit study of the dynamics of the utilization of facilities for the total U.S. nursing home population and for various of its components.