Healthcare institution Mijzo has been dealing with empty rooms in its nursing homes in Central and West Brbaant since the end of last year. A development that healthcare administrator Mireille de Wee had not yet seen coming. “A year and a half ago, we were still looking at how we could shorten the time between the death of a client and the admission of a new client due to the increasing number of vulnerable elderly people at home,” she says.
Now De Wee sees the opposite: not a strong increase, but a decrease in the demand for care from the elderly. “Our waiting list is decreasing. The demand for community nursing is decreasing, there are vacancies in nursing homes and the length of stay has become shorter.”
The healthcare institution has 26 nursing homes spread across Central and West Brabant, in which approximately twenty rooms are currently vacant. Mijzo is not the only organization with this problem. The trade association for elderly care, ActiZ, reports NRC that it is increasingly receiving signals of vacancy.
According to De Wee, it is important to understand the trend break, because there is a logical explanation for it. “The new elderly have different needs than the older people before. They want to live at home more often and keep control in their own hands as much as possible.”
New working method
They have been working at Mijzo for four years on the transformation of healthcare due to the increase in elderly people in need of care and the vulnerable labor market. The aim is to support people so that they can live their own lives as independently as possible, even if they have disabilities or illness.
“The needs of the elderly are central. From there we look at what we can arrange. We help with organizing and facilitating,” De Wee explains.
Figures confirm that. Of the elderly who were entitled to a place in a nursing home in 2017, about 5 percent opted for care at home. Today that is already more than 20 percent, about forty thousand people.
Sick sooner, but healthier for longer
According to one new report from Reable Netherlands Dutch people live longer healthily, but they become chronically ill at a younger age. De Wee states that the result is that the elderly require less care. “People today are more aware of healthy living. There is also much more medical knowledge; this means you can grow old independently, even with an illness.”
The result is that the elderly only enter a nursing home when they really can no longer live at home. “They often stay with us for less time, which means there is more flow. Despite the growth in the number of elderly people, care demands are not increasing,” De Wee concludes.
Staff shortages remain
The healthcare administrator emphasizes that the fact that there are vacancies in a nursing home does not mean that there is less work. “We have just organized our work differently now.” For example, Mijzo employees often visit the elderly instead of taking the elderly to care.
Whether this is a temporary trend or whether the demand for nursing homes will decrease structurally is a difficult question, according to De Wee. “In any case, it is an important signal that we cannot ignore and must take into account in how we prepare healthcare for the future.”
Aging
The number of people over 80 in the Netherlands will double in the coming decades: from around 900,000 this year to 1.8 million in 2045.
At the same time, the number of young people is not growing enough to care for these elderly people. This means that there is increasing pressure on both nursing homes and home care.