A Majority of Older Adults Receiving Help with Daily Activities Report Additional Assistance Needs in Türkiye

Background/Objectives: Help with daily activities may coexist with remaining assistance needs. This study examined current perceived need and functional severity among community-dwelling adults aged 65 years or older in Türkiye. Methods: The 2025 Türkiye Health Survey provided 702 respondents with personal-care difficulty and 1839 with household-activity difficulty. Current perceived need combined help need among non-recipients and additional need among recipients. Survey-weighted logistic models estimated standardised probability differences with household-clustered uncertainty, adjusting for sociodemographics, activity count, severity and condition burden. Separate recipient analyses included 421 personal-care and 1081 household-activity help recipients. Alternative count and income specifications were examined in sensitivity analyses. Results: Among existing recipients, 69.9% (95% confidence interval 64.9–74.5) reported additional personal-care need and 60.6% (57.2–63.8) additional household-activity need. Among all respondents with difficulty, severe versus exclusively some difficulty was associated with adjusted differences of 32.1 percentage points (95% confidence interval 23.8–40.3) for personal care and 24.1 (18.7–29.4) for household activities. Recipient-only severity associations were also positive. Alternative count specifications retained the severity associations, whereas secondary count contrasts were model-sensitive. Household clustering approximated, but did not reconstruct, the complete sampling design. Conclusions: A majority of older help recipients reported needing further assistance. Functional assessment can consider difficulty severity together with directly reported remaining needs, followed by task-specific and multidisciplinary assessment.