Health Care Management Science

Existing literature analyzing the choice of received long-term care by frail elderly (65+ years) predominantly focuses on physical and psychological conditions of elderly people as factors that influence the decision for a particular type of care. Until now, however, the regional in-patient long-term care supply has been neglected as influential factor in this decision-making process. In this study, we analyze the determinants of received long-term care in Germany by explicitly taking the regional supply of nursing homes into account. We estimate a multinomial probit model to illustrate this decision-making process. Therefore, within this discrete choice setting we distinguish between all available types of long-term care in Germany, i.e. four different types of formal and informal care provision. We find that the decision for long-term in-patient care is significantly correlated with the regional supply of nursing home beds, while controlling for physical and psychological conditions of the individual.