Assessing the Distribution of Elderly Requiring Care: A Case Study on the Residents in Barcelona and the Impact of COVID-19

Abstract

In this work, we establish a methodological framework to analyze the care demand for elderly citizens in any area with a large proportion of elderly population, and to find connections to the cumulative incidence of COVID-19. Thanks to this analysis, it is possible to detect deficiencies in the public elderly care system, identify the most disadvantaged areas in this sense, and reveal convenient information to improve the system. The methods used in each step of the framework belong to data analytics: choropleth maps, clustering analysis, principal component analysis, or linear regression. We applied this methodology to Barcelona to analyze the distribution of the demand for elderly care services. Thus, we obtained a deeper understanding of how the demand for elderly care is dispersed throughout the city. Considering the characteristics that were likely to impact the demand for homecare in the neighborhoods, we clearly identified five groups of neighborhoods with different profiles and needs. Additionally, we found that the number of cases in each neighborhood was more correlated to the number of elderly people in the neighborhood than it was to the number of beds in assisted living or day care facilities in the neighborhood, despite the negative impact of COVID-19 cases on the reputation of this kind of center.

Spatio-temporal Analysis of Demand for Elderly Care Services and Its Key Influencing Factors in Chinese Cities: A Web Search Engine Approach

“… 45 , 46 Therefore, the decline in demand in such areas was higher than those with relatively lower levels of economic development, resulting in a significant decline in regional differences and Theil Index. 47 …”

Atendimento odontológico domiciliar em criança com trissomia do cromossomo 9 - tipo mosaico: relato de caso

“…A assistência odontológica domiciliar ofereceu saúde e conforto, através do uso correto de EPIs (respiradores N95, vestimenta, armazenamento e transporte dos instrumentais, dos EPIs e resíduos advindos do tratamento executado), para que não ocorressem riscos de infecção cruzada entre o paciente e membros da equipe. Outra observação é referente ao planejamento em todos os procedimentos a serem realizados, proporcionando otimização da execução dos procedimentos diminuindo as visitas da equipe (Arvelo et al, 2020;Franco et al,2020).…”

A survey of OR/MS models on care planning for frail and elderly patients

“…3. There was only one paper with research conducted on how systems would manage if a sudden rise in frail and elderly patients were to occur [6]. Sudden increase in demand is not a novel area to healthcare modelling with a high quantity of papers investigating this issue, e.g., intensive care units [17,44,79].…”

“…There are many opportunities for research to continue to develop within this area, with particular attention applied to care planning across the pathway for frail and elderly patients. Chronic [4,5,6,9,10,12,13,14,15,18,20,21,22,23,24,27,28,29,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38] [ 40,42,43,45,46,49,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,62,63,68,69,75,78,81,82,83,84,…”

“…Lin et al [52] focused on day care whilst [22,34,35,82] studied home care. The remaining papers focused on either nursing care [5,12,58] or long-term/aged related care facilities [4,6,13,20,21,45,46,68,81]. This shows that within the grouping of community care there were a wide range of different settings being analysed.…”