P. Mcnamee et al., Costs of formal care for frail older people in England: the resource implications study of the MRC cognitive function and ageing study (RIS MRC CFAS), SOCIAL SC M, 48(3), 1999, pp. 331-341
The aim of this paper is to quantify service use and costs of supporting fr
ail older people at home in the community, using data collected in a longit
udinal multicentre stratified randomised study for 1055 mentally frail, phy
sically frail, and mentally and physically frail subjects. Average costs pe
r person per week were found to total pound 64.45, with a small number of s
ervices accounting for a large proportion of the total costs. The level of
services offered by the nonstatutory voluntary and private sectors was foun
d to be small. To highlight issues for policy makers, the extent of cost va
riations between a number of different subgroups were calculated. These biv
ariate analyses revealed substantial variation in costs, especially accordi
ng to household structure, type of frailty, whether admission to continuing
care accommodation occurred and survival. Multiple regression analysis dem
onstrated that 26% of the variation in log average weekly costs could be ex
plained by a number of socio-demographic and health status variables. A par
ticularly close relationship was observed between costs and whether admissi
on to continuing care accommodation occurred, highlighting a need for polic
y-makers to examine the nature and scale of provision of alternative commun
ity based care packages. The results demonstrate that descriptive cost data
such as those presented carl provide information useful to the planning pr
ocess, enabling more informed choices to be made over the provision of serv
ices for particular groups of people. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All ri
ghts reserved.