How Should We Take Care of Elderly?
When you walk on the streets or in the park, figures of the elderly now become a part of the vivid scenery, and the proportion of elders has increased which we cannot ignore anymore. In fact, the proportion of the aging population will “nearly double from 12% to 22%” between 2015 and 2050 (“Ageing and health”). However, the increase in the aging population leads to a reduced working population, placing a heavy financial burden on the government, and medical resources become insufficient because of the increasing demands, so some incapacitated elders may not get on-time treatments. Therefore, how to take care of these elders who have dedicated their entire lives to our society becomes an important issue for every government and family to consider.
In particular, China, with the largest number of elderly people in the world, which is also a developing country with the fastest aging population, has its own way of solving aging population issues. The aging population has put tremendous pressure on China’s economy, politics, and society, especially the financial system, medical service system. The central reason for the aging society is the decline in the birth rate due to long-run one-child policy, lower death rate, and longer life span with the increasing economic conditions. Among them, population aging has a huge impact on the caring system of the elderly, and this caring system is an important line of defense for the elderly.
Currently, the most popular solution for insufficient medical care resources is the private-run senior care center, which is also the mainstream of the elderly caring system in China. Specifically, because “In Beijing, to secure a bed at any public nursing home usually needed to be on the waiting list for around 20 years.”, people’s demand can not be satisfied, so the private-run senior care center could be a much better substitution where elders can move in within one month and have living conditions superior to public nursing homes, according to the article “Why China can support the elderly so well”. Furthermore, those care centers combined medical services and elderly care together, so every member can have access to medical care when needed. For some centers which have more resources, they usually construct hospitals themselves while other centers will choose to build close to community hospitals.
However, sufficient resources with 24-hour care services mean those care centers have a really high fee which many families and elders can not afford. To add to this debate, surveys in “Dilemmas in caring for older adults in Zhejiang Province, China: a qualitative study” by Ma, Jianwei, and Li reveals that only people who have the high financial capacity and are more open-minded show their willingness to both nursing homes and care centers because they don’t want to be a burden to their family. Even though there are elders who want to go to nursing homes but limited by their financial capacity, most elders especially those from rural areas illustrate their hatred of nursing homes, and they consider that going to nursing homes is shameful. This is because they believe that their offspring are the ones who are responsible for their elder life, and only the elders who don’t have children or have a close relationship with their children will be sent to nursing homes. For instance, a male with an age ranging from 61 to 70 in the article said, “I will not go to a nursing home. I have children. They should take care of me when I am incapacitated. Only those without a child or those with disobedient children should be sent to a nursing home.” Even worse, some might consider that their families abandon them in the nursing home, and most of them relate nursing homes with loneliness.
With regards to Chinese society, the government developed a new elderly care system, which is the community-based care center. Community-based care centers provide elders with basic medical services and other services including meal services and cleaning services, and it aims to keep the elders in their homes with care from family members while relevant service centers and people in the community provide home-based services or care services for the elderly(Zhang & Yang). In other words, for elders who don’t want to leave their homes but their families can’t be full-time carers, they are able to order services such as haircut, and there will be people who go to the elders’ homes to do the haircut for them, providing great conveniences for incapacitated elders. Also, elders could choose to go to specific services centers according to their specific needs. For example, my grandmother usually goes to the care center in her community to do a basic health examination every month to make sure everything goes well. Some of these services such as health examination are for free while most services such as providing meals, doing haircuts, and cleaning rooms do have a price to maintain the care center but at a reasonably lower level with regards to elders who have the low financial capacity. Moreover, medical and nursing services are the focus of community-based care centers, so health examinations to test blood pressure and basic body conditions and treatments for daily issues such as flu and injuries become the standard. For communities where living elders have a higher financial capacity, their care centers will provide more advanced services even traveling depending on their financial situations and needs. In Wenzhou, my hometown, there are more than two thousands community-based care centers as of the end of 2020, and the Wenzhou government has imposed policies this month to develop a hundred community-based care centers as models by several aspects including improving infrastructure construction more suitable for elders and providing more services (Huang). However, Ma, Jianwei, and Li demonstrated that most elders don’t know the existence of those community-based care centers and the services they provide, so many elders could not take advantage of community-based care centers.
As a result, I came up with new thoughts about how to take care of the elders based on my previous plan of spreading the nursing homes and lowering its prices. I did not reject my plan entirely, but it can’t be achieved because if the prices are too low for poor people to afford, nursing homes would not have enough money to maintain themselves. Also, researches reveal many problems with nursing homes that not everyone can accept going to nursing homes. Therefore, based on the sources I have found, I came up with one possible solution according to the problem of medical care I have indicated before. To be more specific, advertisement of community-based care centers is essential for elders to know that they are able to receive help from these centers and the prices are very minimal. Also, by promoting the project, the government could receive more funds to invest in centers. Hence, the government could develop these centers with more services, not limited to simple nursing services since the elders would have other demands due to their rising life expectancy.
Not only China, there are other countries also suffering from an aging population in the world, such as Japan and European countries. However, countries’ situations differ according to social, cultural, or economic factors, but Japan has a similar aging population issue, promoting community-based eldercare centers as well, which helps China to solve the problems of insufficient funding, less type of service provided.
As a country against the aging population issue for more than forty years, Japan has much more experience than China that we can learn from. To be more specific, in the article “Community elderly care: What kind of experience does Japan have to learn from?”, the author introduces a new form of community-based care center which is the daycare elder center in Japan, and only Tokyo has more than 28,000 of them. Moreover, many daycare institutions provide special services for the elders according to their needs. For instance, there is one daycare center emphasizing the equipment skills training for the elderly men, while the other claims that they have unique treatment for the elderly with dementia, and there is one that also has a soup restaurant to provide nutritious soup for the elderly. Also, the Japanese chain convenience store Lawson announced that it will provide elderly care services, and the “nursing manager” will stay in the store to provide consultation. Lawson hopes to increase more customers through this new service project. Same as Lawson, DHC, which is a well-known cosmetics company in Japan, attracts consumers with free makeup services while providing basic nursing services for the elder.
With the development of care center inspired by Japan, the cooperation between companies and elder care center is able to advertise both the products of companies and the existence of eldercare center since the elders are able to enjoy the products or services companies provided in the care center and those companies with high influences and popularity can help people to know and understand the community-based care centers.
What if community-based care centers do not have sufficient manpower? Switzerland provides another hint to help improve this problem. Like China and Japan, Switzerland is a country with a severely aging population, and the high costs of nursing homes create high social costs, resulting in a heavy burden on the government. Therefore, the Switzerland government came up with an interesting solution called Time Bank with the aim of providing elders independent lives as much as possible with assistance and accompaniment. If you are a Swiss citizen over 60 years old after retirement, and you feel you are in good physical condition, you decide to take care of the elderly in need. The service time will be deposited into the personal account of the social security system, and the Time Bank will count your service time and issue a “Time Bank Card”. When you are over 80 and you feel you are the one in need, you can take exactly the same amount of time as your service time out and use it. After verifying the information, Time Bank will assign volunteers just like you before to take care of you, providing services. For those elders who have saved time, but don’t need to use it because they live in nursing homes for example, the Time Bank will convert the service time into a certain amount of money or material rewards and return them. This is basically how Time Bank works as a method of mutual support (“Time Banking and Time-Based Currency in Switzerland”).
As a result, by implementing Time Banks in China, elders will have another option after retirement if they want to enjoy their elder life which cannot be afforded by their current financial conditions, or simply find something to do, receiving a new form of salaries. From the government’s perspective, care centers will have enough volunteers to take care of the elders, and with more people, care centers are able to launch new services to develop the system.
With the development of community-based care centers, other questions came out. How could we use our finally improved solution to help the world? What is the bigger implication? Well, to be honest, the solution might not be perfectly suitable for vast and sparsely populated countries because of the goal of community-based elder care centers. To be more specific, the aim of community-based elder care centers is to provide an option for elders who don’t want to be far away from their homes or families, but countries with a sparse population mean that they might not have a high-density population in each community as China does. Therefore, the government might not be able to set a care center in every community or consider a much greater area as one community, so the elders still need to spend some time to get to the center which is obviously a failure of the initial goal of community-based elder care centers. Under this circumstance, there is basically no difference between community-based care centers and nursing homes. However, for most countries in Asia and Africa where the density of population is higher, the care center of each community is able to focus on the elders within a small range, and those elders only need to walk short distances or even several steps to reach the center, lowering the risks of any danger, which can be even considered as proper walking exercises. Hence, the community-based elder care center with improvements is absolutely one project they should try for, and it will help to take care of the elders while prompting the economy at the same time.
Works Cited
“Ageing and Health.” World Health Organization, World Health Organization,
www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ageing-and-health.
Ma, Sha, et al. “Dilemmas in Caring for Older Adults in Zhejiang Province, China: a Qualitative
Study.” BMC Public Health, BioMed Central, 15 Mar. 2019, bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889–019–6637–0.
Moneyland.ch. “Time Banking and Time-Based Currency in Switzerland.” Time Banking
Switzerland, Moneyland.ch, 2 Nov. 2020, www.moneyland.ch/en/time-banking-currency-switzerland-guide.
“Why China Can Support the Elderly so Well.” CGTN,
news.cgtn.com/news/2019–09–12/Why-China-can-support-the-elderly-so-well-JVygx2Hkcw/index.html.
Zhang, Lei, and Jinwei Yang. “The Different Models of Community Eldercare Service in China.”
Frontiers, Frontiers, 24 Jan. 2019, www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2019.00007/full.
“【域外】社区养老：日本有哪些经验可供学习？.” Souhu, 13 June 2018,
