The nursing home population: different perspectives and implications for policy.

Long-term care institutions are used by residential patients who stay for many years and patients with specific ailments who stay for relatively short periods. The presence of short-stay patients is not adequately recorded by cross-sectional surveys which have been used to measure nursing home use. To obtain a better understanding about the mix of long-stay and short-stay patients, we created a hypothetical population of all users of nursing homes in the United States for a 12-month period. Descriptive statistics are presented on this annual population, which we derived empirically from the 1977 National Nursing Home Survey. We found that an estimated 2.4 million individuals used nursing homes at some time during 1976.