[20-year statistics on homes for the aged. A historical analysis]

This article reviews the most important trends in the Dutch Homes for the elderly. Twenty years of statistics on this institutional setting for the elderly from the Dutch Bureau of Statistics provide us with a very useful longitudinal data-base, which has not yet been explored. The main findings of the article concern the tremendous growth in the average size of old people's homes in the past and the continuously increasing dependency of their residents. These two factors seem to play an important role in the time series analysis of the average staffing of the old people's homes.