Is Australia over‐reliant on residential aged care to support our older population?

Gibson, Diane M

doi:10.5694/mja2.51127

Topics

To the Editor: In a recent MJA article, Dyer and colleagues1 stated, “Australia provides institutional long term care for almost 20% of the population aged ≥ 80 years, and 6% of those aged ≥ 65 years. This places Australia as the nation with the highest proportion of older people living in institutional care compared with 11 other nations”.

University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT

Correspondence: diane.gibson@canberra.edu.au

Competing interests:

No relevant disclosures.

1. Dyer SM, Valeri M, Arora N, Tilden D, Crotty M. Is Australia over-reliant on residential aged care to support our older population? Med J Aust 2020; 213: 156–157. https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2020/213/4/australia-over-reliant-residential-aged-care-support-our-older-population
2. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD Health Statistics 2020 Definitions, Sources and Methods. OECD, 2020. https://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/Table-of-Content-Metadata-OECD-Health-Statistics-2020.pdf (viewed July 2020).
3. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. GEN aged care data. AIHW, 2020. https://www.gen-agedcaredata.gov.au/ (viewed July 2020).
4. Gibson D. Who uses residential aged care now, how has it changed and what does it mean for the future. Aust Health Rev 2020; 44: 820–828.
5. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Statistics. Health: long-term care resources and utilization [website]. OECD, 2020. https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=HEALTH_STAT (viewed July 2020).

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