Improving Service Quality of Elderly Care Facilities and Integrated People-Centered Elderly Care:Based on Field Investigations in Three Elderly Care Facilities
The rapid growth of elderly population is driving the development of elderly healthcare service market,and one example of the trend is the increasing number of elderly care facilities.The field survey data from three elderly care facilities in a first-tier city D in east China and a county Y in south-west China indicate that elderly care facilities not only provide available services for individuals and families and effectively make up for insufficient home-based elderly care resources,but also help to build rational intergenerational relationships in the family and the relationship of rights and obligations be-tween consumers and service providers.On the other hand,the survey data also reveal some common problems of the elderly care facilities,including lack of healthcare and humanistic standards in living environment,lack of expertise in human resources,frequent change of staff,not paying enough attention to the application of elder-friendly technologies and devices,as well as the plenty of room for improving the mechanism for cost control and quality supervision.These specific problems of elderly care facili-ties provide important reference value for policy formulation at the macro-level.To address these issues,efforts should be made to focus more on developing healthcare-related standards for elderly care facilities in the future policy-making process,encourage elderly care facilities to create more favorable humanistic environment and make better planning and use of their nursing human resources.Efforts are also needed to improve the quality of vocational education for the training of nursing human resources,encour-age the research and development of elder-friendly technological products and their applications in the el-derly care,and assist elderly care facilities in building big data-based mechanisms for cost control and quality supervision.National policies should be conducive to creating a law-based elderly care service market and encourage orderly competition among elderly care facilities.At the same time,it is also neces-sary to increase financial supports for rural elderly and low-income families so as to improve the avail-ability and fairness of elderly care services.All these policy recommendations aim to create an integrated people-centered elderly care system and ensure a high-quality life for the elderly people in China.
elderly care facilitiesquality of lifeintergenerational relationshiphuman resource and technologyintegrated elderly care
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
