On Tuesday last week, a fire broke out at an unlicensed long-term care facility in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖), leading to the death of three residents. This tragic incident has sparked calls for more thorough inspections to detect unregistered facilities, but also for the establishment of more dormitory-type care homes for older people.
Taiwan will likely become a super-aged society in 2025 and encounter more problems related to elderly care.
Considering the huge amount of money that the government would need to invest in long-term care facilities, is dormitory-type accomodation really the best solution for older people without families?
For those who cannot get accustomed to living in such facilities, should they not be allowed to live their final years in their own homes?
The best solution is to establish coliving communities.
The Japanese government encourages older people to spend their final years in their own neighborhoods.
However, people who are nearing the end of their lives need greater medical care provision. Family members’ ability to provide such care is limited, especially when two older people care for each other.
Shigeru Tanaka, a management professor at Keio University, proposed the concept of a community-based integrated care system.
The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in 2014 adopted Tanaka’s concept, obliging administrations at the municipality, town and village levels to implement and promote the system.
The community-based integrated care system is based on a culture of public assistance, self-help and mutual aid.
Its most important element is the establishment of coliving communities — in other words, to build a social environment in which all kinds of people can live together.
Conventional hospital healthcare, modern home-based healthcare and the services provided by long-term care providers have their place in the community-based integrated care system. They are the means for putting the idea of coliving communities into practice.
All over Japan, there are non-governmental care services where older people who have no family relationship can live together under the same roof.
In such places, they receive the care they need, including end-of-life care.
For example, Miho Ichihara, who has visited Taiwan on the invitation of the Taiwan Society of Home Health Care, established a hospice called Mother’s House in Miyazaki, Japan, in 2006.
This project is borne from a collaboration with doctors of the Miyazaki Gunishikai Clinics’ palliative care unit and home-based care providers, and has established a place where older people can remain in a familiar environment.
Another example is the White Rainbow House in Yokusuka, Japan, a community care space established by Jun Chiba and his wife, who is a nutritionist.
Taiwan, too, has many examples of community coliving.
The government should stop restricting the growth of care resources due to the focus on institutional care facilities.
Instead, it should encourage and foster coliving communities that make their residents truly feel at home.
This model of care can enable residents and caregivers to develop relationships similar to those of family members, and older people can walk the last mile of their lives in familiar communities.
Lo Pin-shan is the deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Society of Home Health Care.
Translated by Julian Clegg
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS