Change in the trend of long-term care service usage following COVID-19 pandemic in Japan: a survey using nationwide statistical summary in 2018-2021

Abstract

AimSocial restriction due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic forced long-term care (LTC) service users to refrain from using services as before, of which degree of change we aim to evaluate in this study.MethodsWe retrospectively analyzed publicly-distributed nationwide statistics summarizing the monthly number of public LTC insurance users in Japan in the period between April 2018 and March 2021. The degree of decline was quantified as odds ratio (OR), where the ratio of a certain month to the reference month was divided by the ratio in the previous year.ResultsThe use of LTC services showed unimodal serial change: it started to decline in March 2020 and reached its largest decline in May 2020, which had insufficiently recovered even as of late 2020. The degree of decline was specifically large in services provided in facilities for community-dwelling elderly individuals (adjusted OR 0.719 (95%CI: 0.664 ∼ 0.777) in short-stay services and adjusted OR 0.876 (95%CI: 0.820 ∼ 0.935) in outpatient services) but was non-significant in other types of service, including those provided for elderly individuals living in nursing homes.ConclusionsCurrent study showed that community-dwelling elderly individuals who had used outpatient or short-stay services were the segments which were specifically affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 Japan. It underlines the need for further investigation for the medium- or long-term influence on the mental and physical health of these LTC service users as well as their family caregivers.