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Written by  2014-09-04

Thesis - Public Awareness in Home Care Services in Singapore 2014 by Mr Ng Nghee Guan Featured

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Lotus Eldercare was invited as one of the organisation to be interviewed in this Thesis done by Mr Ng Nghee Guan, doing his Masters in Public Health. We hereby thank Mr Ng for allowing us to post his painstaking work online. You can reach the author via his e mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

ABSTRACT

Singapore, like any other countries in the world, is facing ageing population. Currently there are about 10% of population who aged 65 years old and above, but this proportion will increase tremendously to 20% by 2020. In fact, the Singapore government have a Healthcare 2020 masterplan to deal with this influx. However, 2 years have passed since the roll out of the masterplan, efforts have being concentrating to build more hospitals, community hospitals and nursing homes to increase the bed count significantly, but will that be good enough?

A study done by US home care service providers, Home Instead Senior Care (2010), showed that seniors and their adult children know little about their care options, are badly misguided about the costs of those options and inadequately informed about the financial resources needed to cover the costs. We would want to ask if Singapore is also facing the same problem.

 

In this thesis, we will focus at the public awareness of one type of the Eldercare services, called the Home Care Services. It is where patients can receive care and treatment in their home, such as consultation or physiotherapy. Home Care Services could be one of the solutions to ease the burden in the hospitals, while acknowledging the elders’ interest to stay somewhere they are familiar with. The survey was held online and had total of forty subjects.

The survey will be asking for respondents’ preferences between staying at homes and to nursing homes or hospice care. The survey will also be asking respondents if they are aware of Home Care Services in Singapore, which is then used to determine the public awaresness of the survey. If the awareness shows that it is lacking, we would need to see how and why would that have happened, how could that be improved?

The outcome of the survey showed that respondents would generally preferred to stay at home as compared to nursing homes or hospice care, and there were very little public awareness in Home Care Services. In order to ascertain that the survey results are accurate, we had also done an interview with a Home Care Service Provider. He had shared with us on how Home Care Services works in Singapore, and some patients are also entitled to some form of subsidy by the government! He had also shared on the market landscape of the Home Care Services in Singapore, and the difficulties the providers faced.

 

Lastly, we will share some conclusions we drew from the survey and interview, providing some recommendations. 

You can download the full Thesis below.

 

Read 7833 times Last modified on Friday, 02 January 2015 09:42

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