[Determining the extent of nursing care need according to the nursing care insurance law in an interdisciplinary comparison].

The quantifying of care needed is an important issue of the long-term care insurance act in Germany. In the last three decades limits of self-sufficiency have been defined in the context of law, medicine, social science and nursing science. Following these approaches this study distinguishes between determining the limits of self-sufficiency and determining the care needed. On that basis the procedure for determining in the long-term care insurance is analyzed and numerous problems are shown. Arriving at non-optimal results can only be understood in terms of briefly explained background material. One solution could lie in the use or further development of existing models which determine the limits of self-sufficiency on the basis of ADL scales.