Past Event

About the Speaker

Raphael Wittenberg  

Raphael is an Associate Professorial Research Fellow at PSSRU at LSE and Deputy Director of the Centre for Health Service Economics and Organisation (CHSEO) at the University of Oxford.

At PSSRU, he leads a programme of research on financing long-term care, which aims to make projections of demand for long-term care for older people and associated expenditure to 2041. He also leads research on direct payments in residential care and on community care for older people and leads modelling work for the MODEM study on care for people with dementia.

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This study examines how far the rise in emergency admissions of older people between 2001/2 and 2012/3 was due to population ageing, how far to the changing likelihood of entering hospital at each age, and how far to other factors which might be more amenable to policy measures. It shows that: emergency admission rates rose with age from age 40 upward but each successive birth cohort experienced lower emergency admission rates after standardising for age and other effects. This downward cohort effect largely offset the consequences of an older and larger population aged over 65. Other factors which could explain increasing numbers of emergency admissions, such as new technologies or rising expectations, appear more important than the changing size and age structure of the population as drivers of rising emergency admissions in old age. These findings suggest that stemming the rate of increase in emergency admissions of older people may be feasible, if challenging, despite population ageing.

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