Chunghwa Post said that before it could branch out into the adult day-care business to generate additional revenue, a number of challenges must first be overcome.
The company was responding to a suggestion last month from the Legislative Yuan to establish a paid service to help take care of elderly people and raise extra revenue for the firm.
The company has about 1,300 branches and 9,000 mail carriers nationwide. From 2009, about one-fifth of its carriers volunteered to deliver mail and packages, run errands or do grocery shopping for senior citizens who live alone.
Last month, lawmakers from the legislature’s Transportation Committee recommended that Chunghwa Post follow the example of Japan Post.
The Japanese postal firm introduced a support service for the elderly, in which postal workers would visit the homes of elderly service subscribers and ask about their health on a trial basis in October in the cities of Hokkaido, Miyagi, Yamanashi, Ishikawa, Okayama and Nagasaki.
In Japan, the monthly charge for the service is ¥1,050 (US$ 10.2), which covers one home visit per month and includes invitations to lunches held at post offices.
The company also plans other services for elderly people, including a 24-hour telephone consultation line, grocery shopping support and safety confirmation checks.
Chunghwa Post president Wang Chang (王昌) said the staff are scheduled to visit Japan Post this month to check out its new mail-sorting equipment.
The delegation would also find out more about how the Japanese postal firm manages the elderly care service.
“Unlike Japan Post,” Wang said, “Chunghwa’s postal workers have been visiting the elderly and doing grocery shopping for them on a voluntary basis.”
Wang said there has to be a legal basis for the company to charge for money for similar services, adding that the way in which the company charges subscribers must be open to public discussion.
The company would also need to hire additional workers to offer a 24-hour telephone consultation service, he said.
Hondao Senior Citizens Welfare Foundation chief executive Doris Lin (林依瑩) said post offices nationwide could function as an elderly care network.
While Lin applauded the efforts of post offices to care for senior citizens, she said that care needs to be provided in a more systematic way in terms of the number of visits and duration of time spent with each elderly person.
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