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Background: In 2019/20 major bushfires devastated Australia's East Coast. Shortly afterward the COVID-19 pandemic was declared. Older people are disproportionately affected by disasters and are at high risk from respiratory pandemics. However, little is known about how these events impact on older peoples' health and well-being and engagement with services such as primary care.Objective: To explore the health impacts of the 2019/20 bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic on older Australians' health and well-being.Methods: One hundred and fifty-five people aged over 65 years living in South-eastern New South Wales, Australia participated in an online survey. The survey measured the impacts of the bushfires and COVID-19 on physical and mental health and the capacity of older people to manage these impacts.Results: Most respondents felt that the bushfires caused them to feel anxious/worried (86.2%) and negatively affected their physical (59.9%) and mental (57.2%) health. While many participants had similar feelings about COVID-19, significantly fewer felt these physical and mental health impacts than from the bushfires. A significantly greater perceived level of impact was observed for females and those with health problems. More respondents described negative mental health than physical health effects. Those who felt more impacted by the events had lower levels of resilience, social connection and support, and self-rated health.Conclusion: The health impacts identified in this study represent an opportunity for primary care to intervene to both ensure that people with support needs are identified and provided timely support and that older people are prepared for future disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the risk of incurring future medical expenditures in light of a family's resources available to pay for those expenditures as well as their choice of health insurance. We model non-premium medical out-of-pocket expenditures and use the estimates from our model to develop a prospective measure of medical care economic risk estimating the proportion of families who are at risk of incurring high non-premium out-of-pocket medical care expenses in relation to its resources. We further use the estimates from our model to compare the extent to which different types of insurance mitigate the risk of incurring non-premium expenditures by providing for increased utilization of medical care. We find that while 21.3% of families lack the resources to pay for the median expenditures for their insurance type, 42.4% lack the resources to pay for the 99th percentile of expenditures for their insurance type. We also find the mediating effect of insurance on non-premium expenditures to outweigh the associated premium expense for expenditures above $1804 for employer-sponsored insurance and $4337 for direct purchase insurance for those younger than age 65; and above $12 118 of expenditures for Medicare supplementary plans for those aged 65 or older. Published 2016. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the 2020 Decennial Census, the U.S. Census Bureau is researching how to use administrative record information from government and other sources in place of field visits during the Nonresponse Followup (NRFU) operation. This paper describes an approach for identifying vacant and occupied housing units to be enumerated using administrative records, removing them from the NRFU workload. While the approach allows flexibility in balancing cost and quality, we evaluate one possible scenario via a retrospective study of the 2010 Census. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article emphasizes the need for new design principles and guidelines in the residential aged care sector to create a more accessible and dementia-friendly living environment. The focus is on safer, innovative accommodation options, dementia-friendly services and empowering older Australians and their families with information when choosing a facility, with a national approach aimed at improving the quality of accommodation design.