Profiling chronic diseases and hospitalizations in older home care recipients: a nationwide cohort study in Sweden

Older adults with home care (HC) often have complex disease patterns and use healthcare extensively. Increased understanding is necessary to tailor their care. To our knowledge, this is the first study to describe patterns of morbidity and hospitalizations among community-dwelling older HC recipients nationwide and in subgroups defined by age, sex, and amount of HC, and to compare patterns to community-dwelling older adults without HC. Nationwide register-based cohort study in community-dwelling adults aged 70 and older receiving publicly funded HC in Sweden on January 1st 2019 and an age-and-sex matched comparison group (“non-HC recipients”). Using register data from inpatient and specialized outpatient care, we assessed the prevalence of sixty chronic diseases, frailty, multimorbidity and hospitalizations, calculated incidence rates and explored reasons for hospitalizations during two years of follow-up. We identified 138,113 HC recipients (mean age 85, 66