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Nursing homes and mortality in Europe: Uncertain causality
Author(s) -
Flawinne Xavier,
Lefebvre Mathieu,
Perelman Sergio,
Pestieau Pierre,
Schoenmaeckers Jérôme
Publication year - 2023
Publication title -
health economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.55
H-Index - 109
eISSN - 1099-1050
pISSN - 1057-9230
DOI - 10.1002/hec.4613
Subject(s) - causality (physics) , czech , nursing homes , population , pandemic , propensity score matching , european population , excess mortality , covid-19 , nursing , demography , medicine , environmental health , sociology , disease , philosophy , linguistics , physics , quantum mechanics , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty)
The current health crisis has particularly affected the elderly population. Nursing homes have unfortunately experienced a relatively large number of deaths. On the basis of this observation and working with European data (from SHARE), we want to check whether nursing homes were lending themselves to excess mortality even before the pandemic. Controlling for a number of important characteristics of the elderly population in and outside nursing homes, we conjecture that the difference in mortality between those two samples is to be attributed to the way nursing homes are designed and organized. Using matching methods, we observe excess mortality in Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Czech Republic and Estonia but not in the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, France, Luxembourg, Italy and Spain. This raises the question of the organization and management of these nursing homes, but also of their design and financing.