Health And Civil Affairs Elderly Long-term Care System Integration

The elderly long-term care continually provides a series of services-such as life care, health care, medical rehabilitation, and so forth-for old people who need help; It is professional and successive, and combines medical rehabilitation with life care. It is an integrated service related to both health system and civil system, aiming at helping the aged to regain normal living activities as much as possible, to maintain and promote physical and mental health, and to improve life quality. With the growing of aging population, the elderly long-term care service is facing severe challenges, which has put great pressure on the health and civil affairs system. At present, the disconnection among different types of care services puts continuous elderly long-time care service into a difficult position. For instance, health care is separated from daily care, and acute treatment is not closely correlated to rehabilitation. Therefore, how to integrate the elderly long-term care resources in heath department and civil affair department needs our concern. It is worth studying that how to promote the cooperation between the two departments, so as to provide a more comprehensive and flexible service for the aged and build a tightly bounded successive elderly long-term care system.From the view of social system theory, social ecosystem theory, and social network theory, this essay uses literature research and semi-structured interview to analyze the current status of community health system and civil affair system, and the difficult in integrating their resources. And then a discussion on the appropriate integrated modes which can be promoted in community and their future directions is given.According to the study, the community long-term care in our country is involved in health system and civil affair system. The health system provides comprehensive health care services to the older age groups in community, mainly including prevention, health care, health education, medical treatment and rehabilitation; while the civil system provides short-term care, daily care, housekeeping services and so on. However, due to lack of institution, recourse supply and knowledge, there are many problems in the integration of the two systems, such as unclear referral role, imperfect referral mechanism, incomplete resource supply, ineffective continuing care, and lack of corresponding facilities and forceful policies. These problems make the community long-term care fragmented and inefficiency. According to status in quo and the discussion, as well as interviewees, this essay puts forward that the referral role of long-term care service can be played by individual or third party organization, but no matter who plays the role, it’s essential to build a free referral cycle care system. At the same time, the research proposes possible modes of cooperation in community:Community Service Center cooperation model, The Social Institution (Organization) cooperation mode and HR cooperation model. Finally, from the perspective of resource integration, the study addresses issues of the future development of long-term care system resource integration in health and civil affairs system, and exposits them on conceptual level, policies level, mechanisms level and operations level, expecting that the cooperation comes true by efforts of both health system and civil affair system. We are looking forward to providing a complete and high-quality long-term care service to the aged.