Study On The Model Of Long-term Care For Disabled Elderly In China’s Urban Areas

With China’s population aging, the number of elderly who are difficult to take care of themselves is increasing. The frail elderly accounts for the proportion of elderly population in general is showing a rising trend.Loss of ability of daily living in the elderly and their disease stage accounted for a greater proportion of their remaining life. How to make them have a happy life is a topic of common concern of the whole society. Now, take care of disabled elderly rely mainly on family members, including their children, spouse, and the nanny. Only a very small number of disabled elderly stay at a professional pension institutions. The community care for frail elderly is still in the pilot phase, and in some places still not been implemented. This issue has become a difficult problem to face and solve in the society.This paper is to study the model adopted by the long-term care of disabled elders in urban areas. This research mainly adopts qualitative research methods and literature research, Qualitative research method mainly uses the case interview and observation. The paper chooses disabled elderly people and their main caregivers in three community and responsible persons and the service personnel of the two larger nursing homes in the urban area as the survey interview subjects to get first-hand interviews. Also by using the methods of documentary, the author collected on text date on the basic status of the pension agency, publicity page and government related documents. Through the using of the first-hand materials, the author make a detailed description of the long-term care of three important models, that is analysis of the traditional family care model, professional nursing care model and community care model. Thus know and pay attention to the challenges they are facing in long-term care. This study found that in the traditional family care mode, faced problems such as insufficient human resources children that are not around or pressed and frail health status of the primary caregivers for the elderly. For the caregivers, their children and their elderly parents are difficult to balance and the family members also have the economic and the spirit burden because of long term care for disabled. What’s worse, when the disabled elderly need go out or get sick, their care are even more difficult. In the professional nursing care model, pension institutions claims that the service staffs have a heavy workload, the supply and demand of the beds exist imbalance. what’s more, there are problems such as a shortages of staff, employees’income are not high; pension institutions’income over expenditure; lack of professional rehabilitation and ancillary equipment; some families members rarely see disabled elderly and the nursing home easily dispute with their families and so on. From the perspective of caregivers, they do not want to send their parents to nursing homes because of traditions or habits and professional organization for the aged is too expensive to accept. They also worried about the lack of professional staffs in the institutions. Furthermore, some professional nursing agencies make it clear that they don’t receive mental illness or totally disabled elderly. In the community care model, the problems lie in that propaganda work is poor; the people don’t trust the community care and community care is difficult to meet the special needs of the disabled elderly. In the conclusion and discussion, the author discussed the scope of three care patterns care; it is the responsibilities of government, society or single person or family? The only child parents will choose what kind of care model? What’s the disabled elderly people and the caregivers’expectations of the government and society? The author has operable suggestions.The best choice for who can’t take care of themselves and need round-the-clock care is professional nursing organizations care model; for part of themselves but activity is not very convenient, we can provide on-site service and flexibly using daycare center, nursing home and other community nursing service institutions. The government and the society should do everything we can to provide a variety of models for different levels of disabled, they can select the most suitable care model based on their own conditions.