Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Residential long-term care (LTC) facilities may be key settings for the prevention of suicide among older adults; however, little is known about the relationship between statewide policies determining characteristics of LTC facilities and suicide mortality. The primary goal of this study was to evaluate the association between state policies regarding availability, regulation, and cost of LTC and suicide mortality among adults aged 55 and older in the United States over a 5-year period. DESIGN: Longitudinal ecological study. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: LTC residents from 16 states reporting mortality data to the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) from 2010 to 2015. METHODS: We linked suicide data from the NVDRS and data sources on LTC services and regulations for 16 states. We applied a natural language-processing algorithm to identify suicide deaths related to LTC. We used fixed effect regression models to assess whether state variation in LTC characteristics is related to variation in the rate of suicide (both overall and related to LTC) among older adults. RESULTS: There were 25,040 suicides among those aged 55 and older reported to the NVDRS during the study period; 382 suicides were determined to be associated with LTC in some manner. After adjusting for state-level characteristics, greater average nursing home capacity was significantly associated with increase in the cumulative incidence of suicide related to LTC (β = 0.087, SE = 0.026, P < .01), but not overall suicide incidence. Neither cost nor regulation measures were significantly associated with state-level LTC-related suicide incidence. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: State-level variations in LTC facility capacity are related to variation in LTC-related suicide incidence among older adults. Given the challenges of preventing suicide among older adults through facility- or individual-level interventions, policies governing the features and provision of LTC services may therefore serve as a means for public health suicide prevention.