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Health of the elderly a key focus
SINGAPORE is ramping up services and facilities for the elderly to avoid running into a critical shortage as baby boomers age. With the number of those aged 65 or older set to spike by 2020, Health Minister Gan Kim Yong yesterday promised to invest in the necessary resources and said: “We need to act now.” On the list of what needs to be put in place by 2020 are:
- Adding 6,600 nursing home beds. This means opening a new nursing home, or expanding an existing one, every few months. Six homes are currently being built.
- Almost tripling the number of rehabilitative care places from the current 2,100 to 6,200.
- Increasing the number of people under home health care from 4,000 to between 8,000 and 10,000. The number under home social care will rise from 2,000 to 7,500.
“We cannot wait for the increase in needs to materialise before we start to build more facilities. It would be too late then,” Mr Gan said at a dialogue with 300 people involved in providing elder-care services. Making his first public appearance as head of the Ministerial Committee on Ageing (MCA), he said that Singapore was looking at major changes and that the Government was committed to doing more for aged care. The panel was set up in 2007 to spearhead Government efforts ahead of the “silver tsunami” – when the number of working adults supporting each elderly person falls drastically, from 8.5 today to three by 2030. One of the main areas that the panel has focused on so far is getting older people to stay healthy. It has rolled out a wellness programme to more than 100,000 people in 42 constituencies, which includes health screening and promoting healthy lifestyles.
The scheme will go nationwide by 2014, and will help ensure that more than 85 per cent of Singapore’s 600,000 seniors in 2020 will still be functional and healthy. Mr Gan said that in expanding facilities and services, the Government would provide the hardware by building more day-care centres and nursing homes, for example, before passing them on to others to run. This approach follows feedback from the elder-care sector. Sister Maria Sim, the administrator of the Villa Francis nursing home, said: “This takes away a lot of our concerns about getting funds, and lets us concentrate our energy on giving care.” Mr Gan said the Government would also work with providers to meet their manpower needs, and explore how technology can help them improve efficiency and productivity. “Now is the time to gear up and plan ahead – our facilities and our capabilities – to better support the evolving needs of our growing population of seniors,” he said. Yesterday’s session at the Concorde Hotel was held to find out from people in the sector what is needed to achieve “a quantum leap in the access and quality of aged care within the next decade”.
Ms Lim Sia Hoe, the general manager of NTUC Eldercare, listed measures that she hoped the Government would put in place. High on her list was greater funding – which the minister has promised – and a review of the “antiquated work rules”. Ms Lim described how one family in need had to fill no fewer than 20 different forms to get the financial help it needed. Mr Walter Lee, a director of the Bethany Methodist Nursing Home, told The Straits Times that integrating information which can be accessed by the various agencies would make it easier to help old people who are poor and illiterate. Tax incentives could be used to encourage investment in the elder-care sector, said Mr Joao Santos Lucas, the academic coordinator of the HMI Institute of Health Sciences, which provides healthcare training. Mr David Lim, the projects and development manager of Presbyterian Community Services, wants to see greater promotion of filial piety, to encourage people to keep elderly family members at home for as long as possible. “I sense that they tend to take the easy way out and institutionalise them,” he said, although he noted that caregivers also need help. In a blog posting last night, Mr Gan appealed to Singaporeans to “accept the need for more aged care facilities to be developed across the island, and in locations within our HDB heartlands, so that they are easily accessible”.
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