At the end of 2012, Guangzhou had only 34,000 beds. By 2021, 240 elderly care institutions in Guangzhou had 72,700 beds. There is still a gap between the demand for 86,490 beds calculated in Table 4. The General Office of the Guangzhou Municipal Government issued the "Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for the Construction of the Guangzhou Elderly Care Service System" and proposed that the total number of elderly care beds in the city should reach 101,200 by 2025. This goal can basically meet the demand for elderly care beds in Guangzhou in 2025 calculated in this paper. At the same time, it should be considered that the demand for elderly care beds in 2030 will exceed 130,000. The increase in beds will inevitably require scientific planning of the layout of elderly care facilities. At present, the urban construction land in Guangzhou is very tight, and it is difficult to open up new land for the construction of elderly care facilities [20], It is not possible to only rely on increasing the number of institutional beds to meet the growing demand for elderly care. It is necessary to explore new ways to make up for the gap in supply and demand for elderly care beds.
In 2015 and 2016, the number of nursing workers in elderly care institutions in Guangzhou was 4,028 and 4,672, respectively, and the growth rate was slow. By the end of 2016, the city's shortage of nursing workers exceeded 12,000. Nursing workers in elderly care institutions have high work intensity, low salaries, and low social recognition, which makes it difficult to recruit professional talents [21]. Some scholars conducted a survey of 600 nursing students in colleges and secondary schools, and the results showed that the proportion of students who intend to work in elderly care institutions is only 15.56%[22]. At the same time, nursing workers who have been engaged in nursing care for the elderly also have a strong willingness to resign[23, 24]. Studies have proved that elderly care workers with high intensity of work involvement also have a certain degree of job burnout and a higher tendency to quit[25], all of which have caused a serious brain drain problem.
This paper has several limitations. First of all, due to the availability of population data, this study only collected the number of the elderly population in Guangzhou since 1990, and the floating population was not included in the government statistics. Therefore, the prediction of the elderly population in 2021 and later is based on the data published by the existing government. Flows in and out of the population may skew ARIMA's predictions to a small extent, but they do not matter much. Secondly, the prediction ability of ARIMA model is limited, and the prediction error increases with the extension of the prediction time. Therefore, this paper only uses ARIMA model to predict the number of elderly people in Guangzhou in the next ten years, without a longer-term prediction. Finally, the advantage of the ARIMA model is to pay attention to the data itself and don't need to explain variables, but further study the effect of still should consider more variables, such as the end of 2019, an outbreak of the COVID-19. Although China has been able to effectively control the new crown epidemic and reduce the impact of the epidemic on the mortality rate of the elderly population, it can be foreseen that the new crown epidemic will greatly affect the lifestyle of the elderly for a long time in the future, and the proportion of the elderly choosing home-based care in the community may increase, which may cause some errors in the demand for beds and nursing workers in elderly care institutions calculated in this paper.