Overview:

Meeting the long term care needs of an aging society is an extraordinarily complex challenge faced by America. While nursing homes play a key role in providing care to the elderly, the industry is marked by tremendous, and sometimes troubling, variation in the facilities where residents reside.

Analyzing data from 17, 253 Federally-certified nursing facilities from across the country, the purpose of this report is to focus on two basic dimensions of diversity among nursing homes:

• Present descriptive data on Federally-certified nursing homes and the residents that reside in those homes;
• Present information on homes operating in settings that differ in their degree of rurality and their geographic location.

Differences in rurality are particularly important given that the proportion of elderly increases as one moves along the continuum from urban to more isolated areas.

Organization of Volume: Detailed tables containing resident and facility level data by region and degree of rurality are presented for the nation as a whole, for each of the ten CMS regions, and for each of the states.

Major Findings:

The main findings reported in Nursing Homes in Rural and Urban Areas, 2000 (Phillips, Hawes & Leyk Williams, 2003) are: 

1. 40% of the nation's nursing homes are located in non-metropolitan areas.

2. Rural nursing homes tended to be smaller than facilities in metropolitan areas.

3. Rural facilities were more likely to be not-for-profit and government-owned.

4. Rural nursing homes were less likely to be  certified to participate in Medicare.

5. Residents in rural nursing homes were more likely to depend on Medicaid to pay for care.

Produced for:

The Office of Rural Health Policy
Health Resources and Services Administration
Department of Health and Human Services

By:

The Southwest Rural Health Research Center, The School of Rural Public Health
Texas A&M University Health System, Health Science Center

Suggested Citation:

Phillips C.D., Hawes, C., & Leyk Williams, M. (2003) Nursing homes in rural and urban areas, 2000. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University System Health Science Center, School of Rural Public Health, Southwest Rural Health Research Center.