National Care Service - people who access adult social care and unpaid carers: evidence

5. Potential future demand for social care

While predicting future demand for social care is extremely challenging, National Records for Scotland forecast that Scotland’s population is expected to age across the coming decades, with a substantial increase in the proportion of the population over the age of 65 years (projected to grow by almost 30% by mid-2045)^[34]. Since currently around three-quarters of people receiving social care support are aged 65+, this means that there will potentially be a substantial rise in the number of people requiring social care support.

National Records of Scotland’s most recent Healthy Life Expectancy publication^[35] indicates that the estimated healthy life expectancy of a child born in 2018-20 was 60.9 years for males and 61.8 years for females. While socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy are stark, socioeconomic inequalities in healthy life expectancy are even wider. The estimated gap in healthy life expectancy between males and females across the most and least deprived deciles in 2018-20 was 24.4 and 24.2 years, respectively.

Previous data linkage work^[36] found that 93% of people aged 65 and over who received social care had multiple long-term health conditions (known as ‘multimorbidity’). This means that lower healthy life expectancy for people living in the most deprived areas could potentially result in greater demand for social care support in these areas.

This was also highlighted in Audit Scotland’s ‘Changing Models of Care’ report^[37], which suggested that the ageing population, deprivation, health inequalities and changes to healthy life expectancy will all contribute to increasing pressures on health and social care services.

These factors are discussed further in the ‘Scotland’s Health and Demographic Profile’ evidence paper.