The Analysis Of The Self-care Ability For China's Elders And The Influencing Factors From The Micro Perspective

The development of healthy aging is a long-term strategy in our country, while the loss of self-care ability is one of the most important issues for elders' health care. If an elder loss his/her self-care ability, he/she will not be able to live independently or they may need others to take care of their daily life. That will only affects the elders' own daily life, but also bring great influence to their family and our society. In this case, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of China's elders' self-care ability and its influencing factors, it will not only be helpful to promote the health condition of China's elders and improve the quality of their daily life, but also can help to predict the related care needs for them and promote the allocation of resources and the regional development of health.This paper takes the international commonly used ADLs and IADLs as indicators to evaluate elders' health and uses the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study(CHARLS) pilot data from 2008 to 2012 to evaluate China's elders' self-care ability and its influencing factors. We consider personal basic factors, personal health condition and personal habits as the most important factors for regression and contrast the China's elders' health care differences between Gansu and Zhejiang Province, by genders and between urban and rural areas. As a result, we found that the advanced ages, female elders, elders living in rural areas and in Gansu province have lower self-care ability than others. High school education has a positive impact to the elders' health while chronic diseases, especially rheumatism, have negative impact to it. And the right amount drinking is good. Regression of different provinces showed that elders from western region have higher probability of disability. Regression by genders showed that female elders have higher probability of disability than males. Regression between urban and rural areas showed that elders living in rural areas has higher probability of disability than who those living in urban areas.Therefore, China should pay more attention to elders' self-care ability, allocate the healthcare resource effectively, attach importance to elders' requirements of nursing care and concern the health condition and self-care ability for advanced aged people. In the development of healthy aging policy, we should pay more attention to female elders, encourage people to take higher education and improve their social and economic status. For western and rural elders, we should develop the public health system and disease prevention system, strengthen the elders' health care, provide subsidies for chronic diseases sufferers and reduce the erosion of the body from chronic diseases for elders.