Entitled AHEAD (Ageing, Health Status and Determinants of Health Expenditure), the project’s main objectives are:
to assess factors that trigger health spending in the EU, with a particular focus on ageing, fertility rates and social changes;
to develop models to project future health expenditures and evaluate confidence limits for the projections.
Funded by the 6th Research Framework Programme, the 18 partners have developed three work packages:
The results of the first Work package on Health and Morbidity by Age and Socio-Economic Characteristics, show that while the current assumption would suspect ageing to cause the rise of healthcare expenditures, mortality itself, rather than ageing, mostly determines healthcare expenditures. Besides, socio-economics inequalities play a large part in explaining the utilisation of health care services as people get older.
The Work package 2 on Health and Morbidity in Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Bulgaria and Slovakia indicates that ageing problems are equally shared in those countries. Hence healthcare costs are most likely to increase in the future.
Work package 3 on Incidence of Poor Health and Long-Term Care aims to compare and analyse the transition between a state of good health, the different types of long-term care (ie health-care institution, long-term residence in a community centre, private households) and death. Results will be incorporated in other stages of the AHEAD programme.
