Research Of The Problems Exist In The Urban Elder-Care Homes In China

In recent ten years, the urban private elder-care homes grows rapidly as one part of the elderly social service system and plays the main role by the encourage of the government’s social policies, under the context of the rapid growth needs of the elderly social service and the welfare-socialization reform practice in the field of the social welfare. But there exists many problems in the organizational elder care service providing and the in the operation of the elder-care homes, such as low service quality and the unequal competition between the governmental-run and private elder-care homes. It’s unable to meet the effective demand for the elderly and their families. These problems not only hinder the realization of the goal of social services, and also limit the further development of the elder-care home services. In order to understand the reasons of these problems and the dynamic process, to help the relevant government departments getting empirical evidence to promote elderly services in the field of social policy toward more comprehensive, fair and effective direction, the study use a multi-dimensional mixed welfare economy analytical framework for analysis.In this study, Martin Powell’s mixed welfare economy analytical framework is used to study the urban elder-care home’s service supply subject, financing conditions and regulatory conditions. It established an research hypothesis:the insufficient commitment to service duties and inappropriate interaction between them would result in the emergence of a variety of problems in the context of the welfare socialization, otherwise would be contribute to the achievement of social service goal. Service principal responsibility is reflected in two aspects of the financing and regulation. Generally speaking, market-oriented mode of financing of the elder-care home would weaken the welfare but would improve the efficiency of service. And the low degree of regulation of the market-oriented homes would not be able to guarantee the high quality of service and welfare institutions, high regulation also would not be able to guarantee the quality of service. This study choose the triangulation method that takes the qualitative research as the main method, and quantity method as assistance for deeply, dynamic research. This study has two sources, one is the census survey data and the group interviews of the elders, families and the administrators in elder-care home that collected by "The Elder-care Homes’Development Research in Tianjin "subjects that the researcher had involved in. The other is from the further five typical elder-care home case interview collected by the researcher on the basis of the previous research. Research data’s reliability and validity can be guaranteed by a standardized investigation procedures, a general survey, more than90%of the interviewees are the main managers in the elder-care homes, representative cases chosen, qualitative information and quantitative data to authenticate each other the. The researcher used SPSS software to statistical analyse the quantitative data and made the qualitative data coded and classification.The study found that the institutional pension main supply from the planned economy era, the national and unit conversion to private (private) pension services. In the way of financing, less government subsidies, poor implementation of preferential policies, the support of the voluntary sector is weak, the institutions of the welfare sources of financing small, rely almost entirely on service charges to maintain operations, reflecting the obvious marketing operation characteristics. Control the study assumes that pension services market operation does weaken the institutional welfare services, is not conducive to the protection of low-income seniors; market operation has not brought about the improvement of service efficiency and quality of service due to the weakening of the welfare support makes the operating costs of the pension services high service object’s limited ability to pay down the price of the levy of fees have not been raised, both in the agencies operational efficiency and quality of service. In terms of regulation, the relevant government departments and to authorize the social organization of private pension institutions loose formal regulation, the regulation system is imperfect enforcement, basically reflect a low degree of regulation is not conducive to the maintenance of the welfare and quality of service assurance to verify the hypothesis. In the service principal responsibilities commitment and interaction between the government, public institutions and industry organizations reflect a strong relationship between control, hindering the responsibilities of these departments play; duties of the government, the voluntary sector, pension services commitments absence conditions, resulting in a heavy family responsibilities and freedom of choice, service monitoring function can not effectively play the situation, verify the research hypothesis three. In short, among the service principal adverse interaction between responsibilities commitment of the government and the voluntary sector in welfare support and regulatory system is not in place the conditions affecting the welfare and quality of service guarantee pension services, and therefore can not meet the service the needs of the object, resulting in a restricted service supply and demand distortions and institutional development.This study enriched the elder-homes’theoretical and applied research on the three-dimensional analysis framework, and also enriched the analysis framework itself. In this study, three-dimensional analysis framework, from financing, regulatory regime, the main responsibilities and interactive relationship between the main aspects, exploring the long-standing reasons in the institutional pension service delivery and institutional development of its own operation, was that a purely market-oriented operation mode not be suitable for the special institutional elder services. Currently, the lack of responsibilities in supervisory and regulatory of the government and social welfare and the uncoordinated relationships between the main objects of the service supply, resulting in the poor quality of institutional care services, weakened welfare, restricted institutional development. In addition, the study found that due to China’s current lack of elder services regulation and supervision, the regulation-dimension in the analysis framework appeared relatively weak. But accordingly found that the service objects particularly the governmental responsibilities could eliminate the pressure and costs brought by the high regulation and then contributed to improve the quality of service by improving the care worker career system for care workers talented education and training, universally enhancing the elder-care homes’service capabilities, providing the key projects and key positions subsidies. Therefore, this study suggests that the original pure "supply" dimension should increase the service objects duties and the interactions, serving as an important dimension of the analytical framework for consideration.