To improve home safety and quality of life for the impoverished elderly, the Federation for the Welfare of the Elderly has been running a house repair program for the elderly across four counties since 2011, funded by Formosa Plastics Group (FPG).
A 70-year-old man surnamed Chen (陳) who has cataracts was sent back to his house in a remote town in Chiayi County by a nursing home where he could no longer afford to stay.
The road leading to Chen’s place was so primitive and in such disrepair that a social worker had to deliver his meals with a rope. He did not have bathing facilities, and with his poor eyesight he often had to answer nature’s calls near his bed.
Chen’s living environment was poorly maintained for three years until the federation’s house repair program intervened a year ago, mending the road and installing motion sensor lights, banisters and bathing facilities.
Federation president Lin Chao-sen (林朝森) said that although the government has offered subsidies for house repair for the low-income elderly, the threshold conditions and the limited budget have hindered many.
Donations made by the FPG, which has supported elderly-friendly projects for years, is therefore especially heartening, he said.
FPG vice chairwoman Susan Wang (王瑞華) told the press conference that “society has a responsibility to help the elderly live a good quality life,” and that because falls are a major risk factor for older people, FPG has supported the house repair program with NT$10 million (US$341,000) a year since 2011.
“A total of 177 households have received house repair services since the beginning of the project and 44 are still under evaluation. Of the 221, 66 percent applied for roof waterproofing, 38.9 percent for bathroom remodeling and nearly 8 percent for barrier-free environment facilities,” federation secretary-general Wu Yu-chin (吳玉琴) said.
“More than 60 percent of the seniors in a survey conducted by the federation said they have fallen in either their bathroom or living room in the past six months,” Wu added.
The majority of the seniors polled also believe that it was easier and safer to perform their daily activities after the repairs, and that the renovations had lessened the burden on their caregivers, Wu said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching