A professor in geriatric medicine said the new pilot scheme to subsidise elderly welfare recipients to live in special homes in Guangdong would be attractive to those who are relatively healthy and fit, but she said the option is not ideal for those who cannot care for themselves. Jean Woo, from the Chinese University's Faculty of Medicine, made the comment after Chief Executive John Lee said in his new Policy Address on Wednesday that the three-year pilot programme would allow up to 1,000 elderly people, who are currently receiving Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (CSSA), to receive monthly subsidies of HK$5,000 to live in designated residential care homes in Guangdong. She told RTHK that it may be very difficult for the elderly with serious illnesses or disabilities to cope with a new environment. "What happens as you get older and older, nobody really knows, because we don't know what the healthcare support is like. If you have various chronic diseases, how easy is it to access primary care, follow-up, and so on," she said. "Healthcare vouchers could be used on the mainland and certainly in some of the hospitals there, so I think that's a great help. So when you start to decline with your brain not working too well and physically you're not moving so well, what would be the situation? What about your social network, your family? There are a lot of unknowns," she added. "I suspect the plan is not to move this group, but to have an option for people who are now living in the community, but wanted to be in an environment where they don't want to cook or do housework, or they want some social activities." Meanwhile, she said the quality and services in local residential care homes (RCHs) would go up, after the chief executive said there would be additional manpower support through the Special Scheme to Import Care Workers for RCHs. "I think we need to do something further upstream to slow down the decline into dependency by having initiatives in the community. But as I said, it's better than nothing," she said. "It's a good direction to go because we are very short of people, the training and so on. But I think the salary needs to perhaps go up a bit more to attract people." In terms of the government's plan to step up support for caregivers by extending their current service of sending community care teams to households in need to other parts of the city, Woo said care teams are great for the elderly because they are equipped with the right training. "From a geriatrician's point of view, we're used to screening multiple domains and we've been doing this using an automatic format and we have created an app so that we can train people in terms of what to look out [for], and watch out for things," she said. "There's a lot we can do before we even get to the doctors and the nurses, and the medications."
