When Florence Knapp entered the Dock Terrace nursing home in 1983, she set a record for having lived in the same residence longer than anyone else. He lived in his home in Pennsylvania for 110 years. According to the National Center for Assisted Living, 59% of all assisted living residents will eventually move to a skilled nursing facility. Overall, the average stay in a nursing home is 835 days, according to the National Care Planning Council.
For residents who have been discharged, including those who received short-term rehabilitation care, the average stay in a nursing home is 270 days, or 8.9 months. How long does the average person stay in assisted living. The implication, he says, is that “we need to involve nursing home residents in planning conversations about end-of-life care and treatment preferences soon after admission. In short, it's not uncommon for a person to receive home care for several months or more, followed by a two-and-a-half year stay in an assisted living facility, and nearly 60% require a nursing home stay of between nine months and just over two years.
For example, while women tend to stay longer in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, they are more likely to be discharged to a home solution than men, who are more likely to move to another facility or to spousal care, if available. The study authors used data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to describe the length of stay of older adults who resided in nursing homes at the end of their lives. Kelly also explains that the findings of this study reinforce the idea that advance care planning should be done upon admission to a nursing home. In a study of older Americans who moved to a nursing home to spend their last months or years of life, 65 percent died there within a year, according to research by researchers at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco and the University of California at San Francisco.
Smith warns that the study did not examine the quality of life of the residents of nursing homes included in the study, nor did it relate quality of life to the length of stay, because the study authors did not have access to these variables. Most of these patients (70%) actually died in the nursing home without being transferred to another setting, such as a hospital. In the study, which appears in the online Early View section of the “Journal of the American Geriatrics Society,” researchers found that the length of stay before death in a nursing home was associated with differences in gender, net worth and marital status. Kelly told me that “although this study does not address why certain demographic and social factors lead to a shorter stay, it does appear that people with greater social support at home have a shorter stay when they are admitted to a nursing home.
People with more access to care and resources could stay in the community longer before moving to a nursing home than those with less access, Kelly explains.
