Research For The Current Situation,Demand And Supportive Policy Of The Family Caregivers Of Senior Citizens In China

At present,China's urban aging speed is accelerating,not only make the country bear a heavy burden of providing for the aged,more importantly,it will affect the stability of society as a whole.The truth is that our country's social security system of the aged is still not perfect,therefore,we need to explore the endowment pattern actively in line with China's national conditions to deal with the severe situation of aging.Currently,China's urban endowment pattern contains two forms,that is family old-age caring and social old-age caring.The family old-age caring is the traditional way in China,but with the development of society,some problems happened,such as deficiency of living care and lacking spiritual consolation,in the context of the gradually weakening function of family old-age caring,social old-age caring came into being.Some scholars believe that the social old-age caring is an inevitable substitute for family old-age caring,in fact,the urban social old-age caring is gradually walking into the plight as well.The service level of community service for home care of the elderly is low,the security system is not perfect and the use of funds is restricted.Although the scale of the pension of institution is growing,the contradiction between supply and demand is prominent,the service quality is not high and the rejection of the traditional concept is adopted.In fact,the current problem of China's urban pension needed to solve is not how to develop the social old-age caring to replace the old-age caring completely,it is how to provide support to the family,so that it continues to play the role of old-age caring.This provides a way for our country to get rid of the plight of caring the elderly-giving priority to the family old-age caring,supplemented by social old-age caring.The task of family old-age caring is mainly borne by the family caregivers,family caregivers make a great contribution for the family age-old caring thereby for the social age-old caring.However,with the acceleration of China's modernization process,the status of family caregivers is not optimistic.In this paper,we take the method of depth interviews of qualitative research,in the form of face-to-face semi-structured interviews,we made a survey for 10 family caregivers in Fang Song street community of Shanghai Songjiang District to acquire detailed understanding of the status of interviewer's family care,including the basic situation of the caregiver's family,the problems encountered in the course of family care,the community's support for home caregivers,and the social support needs of family caregivers.The results of survey show that family caregivers are faced with financial burden of varying degrees;family caregivers are mostly middle-aged and low-age elderly folks,their own physical and mental health are also affected in the process of caring;caregivers lack the appropriate professional knowledge and skills;caregivers will not only produce conflicts of their own role,and conflicts with family members;producing adverse effects on the caregiver's career development;lacking attention and support for older caregivers.In addition,we also learned the needs of home caregivers,caregiver's needs are divided into three categories by author: the need for substantive support;information support needs;the need for psychological support.Comprehension to the status and needs of family caregivers helps to develop supportive policy.At present,the supportive policies of developed countries for caregivers are relatively perfect,for example,they provide the economic subsidy,tax exemption or tax reduction for family caregivers;the provision of "respite care" on mental support helps to reduce the burden on caregivers;using the way of paid leave and flexible work to give caregivers more time to return home providing care for the elderly,besides,there are other service supports,such as basic medical service,family assistant service,case management etc.From the experience of foreign family caregivers,we can see that it is mainly through the public supportive policy to reduce the cost of family care and to target the policy in making the elderly at home as much as possible,emphasizing the support to the job market for home caregivers,focusing on the cooperation of policy mix and multisectoral.In view of the experience of foreign family caregivers,this paper designs the policy support system for family caregivers at the present stage in China: strengthening the legislation guarantee of caregivers;developing the basic living security policy for family caregivers;establishing the developmental demand protection policies of family caregivers,and improving other services of family caregivers,such as respite service,information service,psychological service and so on.