Residential care in Europe - statistics & facts
By 2050, the forecast age distribution of the European population predicts that the largest share of Europeans will be aged 60 to 64 years old. Therefore, the old-age dependency ratio in European countries (share of people aged over 65 per hundred people of working age) is expected to drastically increase. In 2019, the share of Europeans aged 65 and older who had long-term limitations, such as mobility limitations, reached 33 percent. Healthcare already represents an important cost for European countries. As of 2019, the healthcare expenditure as a share of GDP in many European countries exceeded 10 percent. Long-term residential care accounts for a non-negligible part of this healthcare. In 2018, the share of long-term residential care in Europe’s healthcare expenditure amounted to 10.2 percent. In the Netherlands, long-term residential care even reached 27 percent of its healthcare expenditure. These factors will ultimately require European health care systems to redesign elderly care and especially residential care.
