Elderly services to get S$400m boost

BOOST!

The Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) will spend S$400 million over the next five years on services and programmes for the elderly, with the bulk of it going into transforming community and home-based eldercare services to support ageing-in-place.

These initiatives include the setting up of integrated day facilities, developing ensuite social home-based care, greater support for caregivers and families, and ramping up of Seniors Activity Centres.

The Integrated Day Facility (IDF) will provide basic day care, together with rehabilitation and dementia programmes, for frail elderly. It will also serve as a node for eldercare information, referral and care coordination.

The first two new IDFs will be built this year, in Tampines and the Bishan/Toa Payoh area. Six existing day care centres and day rehabilitation will also be upgraded into IDFs.

By 2016, there will be 40 IDFs which can serve up to 6,000 elderly persons requiring day care.

The elderly can look forward to receiving the necessary home services from a single trained care staff in their homes who are trained and equipped to perform a range of services for them.

The Centre for Enabled Living has worked with a couple of organisations to pilot this service model and it has worked.

By 2016, the service will be scaled up to benefit up to 4,000 elderly - more than twice the number of users for home-based care today.

The ministry will also enhance the subsidy framework to make community and home-based eldercare services more affordable. The changes are aligned to the revised subsidies for intermediate and long-term care under the Ministry of Health.

With the enhancements, about two-thirds of Singaporean households with elderly are eligible for some form of subsidy. The middle-income households will see the highest increase in subsidy levels which will take effect from the third quarter this year.

MCYS will absorb the GST on services to further reduce costs.

These subsidy changes

Meanwhile, there would be more respite option for caregivers.

The CEL will look at developing more support services, such as counselling and elder-sitter programmes, to address the psycho-emotional stresses that caregivers often experience.

To better support vulnerable elderly in the community, MCYS plans to increase the number of Seniors Activity Centres (SACs) from the current 41 to 58 by 2016.

Of these, 16 will be "Anchor SACs".

These will have additional funding and social work capabilities for case-management, coordination and monitoring services to vulnerable elderly.

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