Elderly in need of more care, facilities

• Source: Global Times
• [08:15 August 02 2010]
• Comments

By Liu Dong

As parents of only children continue to age and require more support from their child, advocates of healthcare reform for seniors are calling on the city to invest in the resources needed to look after the elderly before too late rather than simply throwing money at the problem now.

The call for better infrastructure for the aging comes after the city government announced over the weekend a new policy to help alleviate the burdens encountered by the first generation of those born from 1979, the birth of the single-child policy generation.

After parents of such families retire, each household will receive a 2,300-yuan ($340) subsidy from the government, meant to help children with expenses for their aging parents, according to Xie Lingli, director of the Shanghai Municipal Population and Family Planning Commission.

But Lu Wei, council member of Shanghai Senior Citizen Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that promotes the right of the elderly, said that old people need more care facilities that cater to their needs.

"They need a place that can tend to their needs," she told the Global Times Sunday. "We need to build up reliable infrastructure for this demographic before their situation becomes dire.

"At the moment, we're very limited as to what we can do to help these individuals because we lack enough support from the government," she said.

According to Wang Daben, a professor at the Population Research Center of East China Normal University, parents with a single child will start retiring in five years, at which point they will be entering their 70s.

"Only children will be strapped financially and feel emotionally helpless without aid," he told the Global Times Sunday. "They won't have all the time and energy in the world to devote to their parents as they will have their own families to manage, in addition to work responsibilities."

Wang suggested that the government invest in home-care centers for the elderly instead of giving them a lump sum of cash that will do little for them in the long-term.

"If their parents get sick and need to be hospitalized, they might need someone to look after them every day, but with all their other commitments, children won't be able to do this," he said. "The city is going to need more care facilities for these people, as well as more qualified nurses that can help look after them."

A government report released Saturday said that 80 percent of elderly people in the city will rely on their one child to care for them by 2013. The study further projected that by 2015, senior citizens will comprise 30 percent of the city's population.