Co-Locating Older Retirement Home Residents: Uncovering an Under-Researched Population via Postal Code

Retirement home residents represent a growing proportion of older Ontarians who cannot be identified within existing administrative databases.

This article aims to develop an approach for determining, from an individual's postal code, their likelihood of residing in a retirement home.

We identified 748 licensed retirement homes in Ontario as of June 1, 2018, from a public registry. We developed a two-step evaluation and verification process to determine the probability (certain, likely or unlikely) of identifying a retirement home, as opposed to other dwellings, within a postal code.

We identified 274 (36.7%) retirement homes within a postal code certain to indicate that a person was residing in a retirement home, 200 (26.7%) for which it was likely and 274 (36.7%) for which it was unlikely. Postal codes that were certain and likely identified retirement homes with a capacity for 59,920 residents (79.9% of total provincial retirement home capacity).

It is feasible to identify a substantive cohort of retirement home residents using postal code data in settings where street address is unavailable for linkage to administrative databases.