More than twice as many Tampere residents aged 90+ now live at home without formal care

More than twice as many Tampere residents aged 90 and over now live at home without receiving home care services compared with 2001. Tamperelainen reports the finding comes from the long-running Tervaskannot 90+ study, which compared seven survey rounds between 2001 and 2022.

The study found the number of people aged 90+ living at home without home care rose from 325 in 2001 to 706 in 2022, while those with dementia increased both among people at home and those in round-the-clock care. Overall illness burden has grown across all groups, yet functional ability has remained largely unchanged. "Our research shows the role of relatives as the main providers of help has increased," study leader Linda Enroth said, and she added that service availability appears to be steering care use: policy favouring living at home has reduced round-the-clock placements but home-care coverage has not expanded at the same pace.

Tervaskannot 90+ gathered responses seven times between 2001 and 2022, with 6,876 respondents in total. The project, which began in 1995 and has supported about 100 scientific articles and 14 doctoral theses, is now launching a new postal and online survey inviting Tampere residents born in 1936 or earlier — roughly 3,000 people — to update the dataset.