Research progress in measurement of care needs of older adults: a review

With the acceleration of population aging worldwide, the proportion of older adults with functional impairments is gradually rising. Accordingly, increasing care needs emerge. Studies have explored the measurement of care needs, while most studies are confined to single-domain measurement, and there is a lack of systematic summary. With the literature research method, we classified the care needs into three dimensions of duration need, manpower need, and expense need and reviewed the related research contents and results to reveal the measurement dimensions and commonly used tools for care needs. Furthermore, we analyzed the reliability, validity, and application status of the measurement tools, aiming to facilitate the quantitative evaluation of the large and personalized care needs of Chinese older adults. The results showed that the available studies on care duration need measurement usually used the length of time that older adults receive care within a certain time range to evaluate the care duration or intensity. The studies on the measurement of manpower need usually included the roles and number of formal and informal care providers. Domestic scholars mostly predicted the manpower need of disabled older adults from a macro perspective. The measurement of care expense needs mainly included the direct and indirect costs when older adults received care. Most studies predicted expense needs based on the population size with care needs. However, there are few studies on comprehensively predicting the duration, manpower, and expense needs of older adults. Therefore, future studies should consider the above measurement dimensions of care needs, the coordination of formal and informal care, and the combination of macro and micro needs, thus providing a basis for meeting the care needs of older adults and promoting rational allocation of care resources at the government level.