Unmet Needs for Assistance with ADLs and IADLs: A Measure of Healthy Life Expectancy

Measures of healthy life expectancy have beendeveloped over the last thirty years to evaluate thequality of life of an increasing life expectancy.These measures are usually accounting for prevalencerates of either disability or physical dependence inperforming everyday activities. Although they allowfor a better assessment of quality of life, they arenot reflecting the fact that a disabled person mightbe receiving adequate or inadequate assistance forthese activities. In a context of population aging,where our health care system will have to deal moreand more with chronic disease instead of acutedisease, it is imperative to develop a measure thatwill account for the adequacy of the assistanceprovided to the disabled elderly population. Usingdata from the 1986 Health and Activity LimitationSurvey, we are introducing a measure of healthy lifeexpectancy which will fill this gap. We present theconstruction of this measure of population health anddiscuss its usefulness in assessing policies at amacro level.