III. Experience and Suggestions
1. Continue the further cooperation with IFA
Through attending this conference, we found IFA¡¯s effective work style was very impressive to us. Generally, it feels like that the arrangement was scheduled very orderly and with rich contents during the meeting time. The Global Conference was opened as soon as the Senior Officials Meeting closed on later September 4th; nearly a hundred of presentations and lectures were arranged throughout the 4 days of meeting, and with 5 plenums and one product exhibition, all of which had provided a large of information to the delegates. It was a little pity that some of reports and presentations were failed to release since the time conflict. However, this full scheduled meeting enabled us learn more ageing-in-place situations in other countries in such a short period and enlarge our view on ageing services, which was a valuable experience for us.
IFA is one of the perennial international partners of CNCA, which has always paid great attention on the cooperation with CNCA. Since a decade of the membership of IFA, CNCA has participated in several programs organized by IFA, while the initiative functions and contributions of CNCA were somehow limited. The suggestion is in the future, CNCA should be more initiative for relevant activities, in order to implement the obligation of being the largest member of IFA in Asia, to publicize China¡¯s achievement on ageing to the world, to exchange and discuss international issues on ageing, to enhance China¡¯s international image, and to play the corresponding role in the world ageing careers.
2. Ageing-in-place needs more joint effort of the government and society
According to other countries¡¯ presentations, a large part of senior citizens in their countries would like to choose aging in place, and only less than 10% of them choose the nursing homes. Though the developed countries have had established many of nursing homes earlier, they have realized the importance of ageing-in-place in recent years, so they adopted a series of actions to help the elderly to realize the program, including improving service environment, enhancing the service ability, and setting up facilities for the aged in the community. Meanwhile, all of the counties also paid much attention on the roles of civil organizations, enterprises, families in ageing-in-place. The ageing-in-place needs powers of all parties.
We have noticed that, many of developing counties also mentioned that, the responsibility of government should be limited to a rational and endurable scope. We agreed with this principle. When China developed ageing-in-place program, the government responsibilities of demonstration, promotion, support, planning and supervision must be fulfilled, but the government should not be the sole part. The influences of family, society, and individuals are all needed to be stimulated to jointly support the ageing-in-place program.
3. Ageing-in-place needs political guarantee
Ageing-in-place is not a temporal work. Instead, it is a long-term work to tackle the challenges caused by population ageing, and to satisfy the demand for old-age service of the elderly. The stable development of ageing-in-place program cannot rely on some actions by chance, while it has to be brought into the constructive orbit so to be effectively developed by political guarantee. These policies include:
(1) Bring the ageing-in-place program into the society development planning and yearly work planning of departments of both central and all local levels; and put it into the agenda of officials as one of the most important routines to deal with.
(2) Establish the suitable financing system for the ageing-in-place program, including old-age support, medical insurance, which enable the elderly enjoy the financial support of ageing-in-place services. Especially for those elderly who need long-term care, there must be a long-term care insurance system to support them. Currently, China hasn¡¯t worked out on this policy, so we have to learn more from foreign experience.
(3) Stipulate policies to encourage and support the private institutions that provide ageing-in-place services, especially in the aspects of industry approval, revenue preferential, loan support and so on, so to make more social resources pour into the ageing-in-place program. And make market system play more and more important role in the process of ageing-in-place.
(4) Combine the ageing-in-place program and nursing institution. This can not only give enough time for most of the elderly for their ageing in place, but also enable those elderly who really need nursing institutions get more professional care, which finally could find the balance between the ageing-in-place system and nursing institutions, so to make better use of resources of both models.
(5) Other compounding policies, e.g. construction planning in community, housing support for the aged, support for caregivers (especially the family members), authentication and training system for human resource of ageing-in-place program, and so on.
4. Ageing-in-place of China has to go its own way
The present delegates reiterated that, with comparison of China¡¯s over-populated senior citizens, they were only ¡°a little village¡±, which meant that any simple problem on ageing would become a huge issue when multiplying the number 153 million. It was not difficult to provide somewhat welfare-like ageing-in-place services for the elderly for those countries with relative higher GDP and smaller ageing population. However, it was completely impractical for China to follow the ¡°model for small-sized country¡± or ¡°model for the rich country¡±, since it had such a large amount of ageing population and had been ¡°older before rich¡±. Therefore, China had to work out a ¡°model for large-sized country¡± of its own feature, for some western experience may work well in western countries but it might not adapt to China¡¯s situation.
(Reported by Wu Yushao, Sun Huifeng, Wang Longxuan on September 20th, 2008)
