Modelling long-term care for older people China

This report outlines an Operational Research (OR) model to plan long-term care (LTC) provision for older people in urban and rural China. Many countries in both the developing and the developed world have been experiencing a marked demographic shift towards an ageing population. An ageing society can present challenges, such as addressing the high demand for health and social care amongst older people, particularly in the latter part of the life course. Planning, delivering and financing such LTC provision for older people can be a challenge for local and national governments. This research is part of the EPSRC Care Life Cycle (CLC) research project at the University of Southampton, which aims to build and use a suite of simulation models to assist UK policy makers at the national and local levels in planning health and social care provision more effectively for future cohorts of older people, both in the UK and globally. The model outlined in this report is a contribution to this body of work.This research involves the development and use of a discrete event simulation (DES) model (which is named as ‘SIMCARE-CHINA’ model) to display the different pathways for using alternative LTC services among older people in China: informal, institutional, community-based, private, and voluntary services. The number of people who do not need care or who have unmet needs is also included in the model. This model is applied to different areas/levels – urban areas and rural areas –to consider the different LTC demand projections. The main dataset used to make the projection is composed of the Chinese Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) and the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS). Data from other sources and previous studies are also used. SIMCARE-CHINA model can be used to test alternative scenarios and policy reforms and to evaluate their performance in terms of the LTC needs met amongst older people in urban and rural China, from the perspective of both the government and individuals. Thus, such modelling can offer researchers and policy makers an opportunity to understand the LTC system better and explore the outcomes and effects of different policies and reforms through simulation, with the aim of making recommendations for future improvements.