Assessment of Unmet Care Needs in Aging Populations

The assessment of unmet care needs among older adults has emerged as a pivotal component of geriatric research and service planning. Unmet care needs refer to the gap between the assistance required by an individual and the support actually received. In ageing populations, these needs span physical domains (mobility, self-care), psychological and cognitive domains (mental health, memory support), social domains (companionship, daytime activities) and environmental requirements (safety, accessibility). Standardised instruments allow researchers and clinicians to quantify both met and unmet needs, enabling comparison across settings and populations. Studies consistently demonstrate that higher levels of unmet care needs are associated with poorer health outcomes, increased depressive symptoms and diminished quality of life. The global rise in people aged 65 and over, along with shifts towards community-based and primary care models, has intensified the focus on precise needs assessment. Accurate identification of need profiles supports tailored interventions, informs workforce training and guides policy decisions to allocate resources where the risk of unaddressed need is greatest. Emerging work also highlights the interplay between informal caregivers’ capacity and the persistence of unmet needs, pointing to the importance of dyadic assessment and supportive services for both older adults and their carers.

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Assessment of Unmet Care Needs in Aging Populations publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in assessment of unmet care needs in aging populations across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Unmet care needs: The discrepancy between the support required by an individual and the assistance actually received across physical, psychological, social or environmental domains.

Camberwell Assessment of Need for the Elderly (CANE): A structured instrument for evaluating both met and unmet needs across multiple life domains in older populations.

Quality of life (QoL): A multidimensional construct encompassing physical health, psychological state, level of independence and social relationships.

Latent class analysis: A statistical technique used to identify unobserved subgroups within a population based on response patterns to observed variables.

References

1. Profiles of met and unmet care needs in the oldest-old primary care patients with depression – results of the AgeMooDe study. Journal of Affective Disorders (2024).
2. Self-perceived care needs and quality of life in people with cognitive impairment during routine care at home: cross-sectional results of the interventional study. BMC Geriatrics (2023).
3. Predictors of Unmet Needs in Chilean Older People with Dependency: A Cross-Sectional Study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2023).