The Research On Spatial Distribution Of Elderly Care Facilities In Shanghai

The world as a whole can be seen to have entered an "aged" phase at the turn of the Millennium. Population ageing has become the common society problem faced by many countries and regions. Shanghai is the first ageing city in China. It got great progress in the development of elderly care facilities in the past ten years, but it still face many problems and challenges in the courses of development. Imbalance of spatial distribution is one of the serious problems, which impedes future development of elderly care facilities and construction of harmonious society.In recent years, development of elderly care facilities in Shanghai increasingly diversified. This research aimed at analyzing and discussing spatial distribution of aged home and community elderly care facilities in Shanghai, to find present problems and give guidance for the future planning of the elderly care facilities. After combing definitions of major pension models, the different types of elderly care facilities and relevant research progress, the dissertation analyzes the characters of ageing population, including scale change and prediction, age structure, and spatial distribution. Then with discussing of the present situation of the aged homes and community home-base care facilities, this research uses GIS spatial analysis function and spatial accessibility method of urban public facilities to analyze the spatial distribution of these two types of elderly care facilities separately, then base on the result, giving reasonable suggestions.The main results of this research are following. In terms of aged homes, firstly, in central town, the aged homes distribute densely and have relative better spatial accessibility, but most of them are in small or middle scale, overall beds in aged home are still insufficient. In suburban area, there are larger scale aged homes dispersing with lower spatial accessibility. In the meanwhile, aged homes in urban area have easier access to hospitals which is important for the aged. Secondly, the occupancy rate of aged homes decreases after a slight increase from the center town to suburb. In urban fringe, aged homes have the highest occupancy rate. In the circle area which is 20 kilometers and 30 kilometers far away from People Square, the occupancy rate shows a rapid decline. The occupancy rate of aged home in the remote suburbs is lower than 50%. As for the community care facilities, it shows more serious spatial differentiation and resources congregate in certain districts or communities. Assuming service area for one facility is one kilometer square, about 50% of the urban area can be covered by the community service for elderly people, but the rate of coverage is under 15% in suburban. Considering these problems, the dissertation gives four suggestions. Firstly, make general spatial planning for the aged homes and coordinate development in urban and suburban, limit blind construction of the large scale aged homes in remote suburbs and allocate more resources in the urban fringe and outskirts. Secondly, increase the coverage rate of community elderly care facilities. Thirdly, make combination of aged homes and community elderly care facilities, enhance the efficiency of providing service. Finally, make innovation of the way to provide elderly care service.This dissertation includes six parts. The first chapter is about the research content, methods, significance, framework, and data collection. In the second chapter, sort out the relevant definition, research progress and theory basis. The third chapter is analysis of the ageing situation in Shanghai as well as development of aged homes and community elderly car facilities. The fourth chapter is to explore the spatial distribution of aged homes from the view of spatial accessibilities, proximity to hospitals, the spatial characteristics of occupancy rate. The next chapter is analysis of the spatial distribution of community elderly care facilities. The final chapter gives the conclusions and suggestions, as well as further thinking of the research.