An Empirical Research On Government Purchases Of Home-Based Aged-Care Services In Wuhan City

Our country has entered the aging society since 1999. With the development of aging population, the weakening of family function in the endowment caused by the economic and social development, and the choose of aging-in-place made by most of the elderly because of the traditional ideas of China, the government has begun to purchase the home-based aged-care services from civil society organizations to alleviate the pressure of pension. Different from the previous studies, this paper selects the city of W, whose aging rate is much higher than the average level of the whole country, as the starting point to study the problem of purchase of home care services. This paper studies why and what they purchase of the services in Wuhan City, and what services that the elderly demand for aging-in-place, and discovers problems existing in the process of purchasing, and puts forward some guiding suggestions on improving the purchase of Wuhan City based on the reference experience of other place.This paper is divided into seven chapters, the main contents of each part are:The first chapter is the introduction, which puts forward the reason of choosing this topic and the research significance, establishes the research perspective on the basis of domestic and international literature review, and proposes the research framework and methods, and also points out the innovation and limitations of this paper.The second chapter introduces the fundamental concepts and theoretical foundations. It expounds the meaning of some core concepts such as aging in place, purchase of public service contracting, purchases of home-based aged-care services, especially establishes the division standard of aging in place, institutional pension and family supporting, and explains the new public service theory and welfare pluralism theory which are the two theoretical tool in the thesis.The third chapter analyses the performance of the government in purchase process in Wuhan City. It introduces the basic situation, especially the population, and then presents the development of the way to purchase services in detail.The fourth chapter analyses the performance of the social organizations in purchase process in Wuhan City. It introduces the types and the role of social organizations in the purchase of Wuhan city, the overall situation of social organizations in W city, and takes two organizations as an example to introduce all the social organizations in Wuhan City.The fifth chapter analyses the demand for the purchase of home-based aged-care services based on the survey of six communities in Wuchang District. It contains literature review of the demand, data sources, results analysis, conclusion and discussion.The sixth chapter analyses the experience and problems of the purchase of home care services in Wuhan City. It finds that the features of the purchase are government-led, community-based and social organization as the main body, and there are some limitations in the process of purchase.The last chapter is about some suggestions for the improvement of purchase in Wuhan City. It proposes three basic principles of purchasing:demand oriented, moderately inclusive and competitive, and suggests that, in order to continue to advance purchase of home-based aged-care services, the government should develop the model of aging-in-place in the future, standardize the purchase process, improve supervision and performance evaluation mechanism, and at the same time, cultivate talents of social organizations and innovate mechanism for the development of social organizations.