The mindset of the family members must change, to not think, that if their elderly loved ones is being looked after by professionals, then, they wouldn’t have to put in the time to care for their elderly families, off of the Front Page Sections, translated…
As many of us headed home for the Chinese New Year’s, there are those families, faced with the trials of who’s looking after their demented elderly family members; during this holiday period, I’d had a case of long-term-care that struck up my thoughts on the futures of family care for the demented elderly population.
For most, those elderly who needed the cares can be classified into “Three losses”: losing employment, dementia, and, elderly who’d lost the abilities to care for themselves. Of these, the unemployed meant, that after retirement, the individuals no longer had a sense of purpose and focus, but can still take care of one’s own daily living, still mobile, and healthy; for this group their caretaking needs aren’t of the physical, but of the psychological, spiritual sorts that revolved around socialization. While, for the elderly who are demented, and lost the abilities to care for themselves in their daily routines, this is the reason why the children are seeking help from the outside. Currently, there are two kinds: one, hiring a foreign care nurse or household help, to stay in the home of the elderly person, providing around the clock care; second, taking the elderly family members into a residential home, to have them living their based off of the homes’ schedules, to split up the requirements of time and energy in caretaking.
But, as this sort of a professional care provisions become more popular, it’d, weakened the structures of the individual families, and the families’ caretaking functions, and this can cause an even bigger crisis for the relations of the family in sum. I’d bore witness personally to a case like this. An elderly woman in her eighties had a fall by accident right before the New Year’s, to the point she became immobilized, and couldn’t look after herself, and needed around-the-clock assistance. Although, this elderly woman had many children, but, most of her offspring are living out of the country, and those offspring who live here all had their separate families to look after during the New Year’s, so, the children who are living away requested her children in Taiwan to find her around-the-clock care at home, and that the children who are living abroad will be covering for the costs of her care entirely.
what the elderly population feared most in Asian communities
Because of how sudden this had happened, and the elderly woman’s relatives new of a friend who works in the industry, and, in the help of this friend of the family, they’d found ten qualified caretakers who lived close to her neighborhood, all whom chipped in during the New Years around the clock to provide the care, but in the nine days of holiday, due to the expectations, the setting up of the care systems for the elderly, plus the shifts handing off, made the entire process of communicating the needs of the family especially trying, and it’d made us see, the unspoken trials of the particular case.
Luckily, after nine days of being looked after carefully by the professional staff, the elderly woman slowly recovered, and was able to perform the basic living functions now, and the families can now, care for her; but only, the elderly woman’s family wanted the care provision to be outsourced to strangers. However, after the New Year’s holidays, this group of temporary community caretakers are to return back to their separate posts of work, and who will be taking care of the elderly woman’s living needs around the clock, became, a total, challenge.
Actually, this case showed, that if the caretaking needs is completely outsourced to professionals, without the members of the families willing to chip in, surely, the long-term care profession will become, business-like and systematic, and, the functions of the families as the primary care provision units will be gone, slowly.
But, is this, the best direction to which long-term care takes, as we’re, approaching the super elderly society now? Actually, if the government provides the systematic training means for every citizen, then, we will all have the basic skills of caretaking, and, educating the families to share their responsibilities of taking care of their aging elderly families, maybe, that, is the long-term working solution for the aging of the society. Using the networks of support in the local communities, to acquire the skills needed for the families to care for their elderly families long-term, to NOT use the “community care provisions” or the “nursing home care” to take place of the families “care-at-home” programs, that may be, the only solution to long-term care.
And so, this just showed the mindset of the people here, if you can leave the caretaking to someone else, then, all you need to do, is to visit your own elderly families three, four times a week, to see how they’re, doing, but this is, totally, not being responsible for the people who cared for you when you were younger, and feeding to the beliefs, of how those who are living in nursing home facilities are, deserted by their loved ones, in the traditional Chinese belief systems.