As the nation considers revisions to its long-term care system to cope with an aging population, amendments to enable Aboriginal communities to develop their own long-term care models are crucial to protect their rights, a rights campaigner said yesterday, adding that poorly designed regulations have served to deny care to Aborigines.
“While we may have our own way of implementing care for elderly people in our villages, under the current long-term care system, government resources are never going to reach us because of their focus on large districts and architectural restrictions for care facilities,” said Yabung Haning, a Truku Aborigine who works with the Indigenous Peoples’ Long-term Care Alliance.
“There are three types of long-term care under the current system: institutions, community care and home care, but we see practically none of the first two in Aboriginal villages because of restrictions on land usage,” she said.
A majority of the facilities in Aboriginal communities are technically illegal because most of the land is zoned for farming, she added.
“While the government might turn a blind eye to private homes [being used as long-term care centers], if you want to apply for any kind of institutional or community care facility you have to provide documents to show that the construction is legal,” she said, calling for rules to be amended to match application requirements for Aboriginal child care facilities under the Early Childhood Education and Care Act (幼兒教育及照顧法) and allow applicants to submit proof of structural safety rather than a construction license.
She added that the regulations for home care also put elder Aborigines at a disadvantage by requiring the organizations contracted to provide care to take on large quotas across broad swathes of territory that often cross city and county boundaries.
“This pressure to efficiently fill quotas of hundreds of patients creates a situation in which care personnel will focus on cities,” she said.
Small communities with limited resources find it difficult to create care facilities that meet government requirements, she said.
Because of cultural and lifestyle differences among Aboriginal groups, national policy should be customized to allow each group to develop its own mode of providing long-term care, she said, adding that the Ministry of Health and Welfare has failed to collect data and establish a mechanism for dialogue with Aboriginal groups.
“The government is already in its 10th year of providing services, but it does not have any data on service to Aboriginal elders — so we do not even know how many Aboriginal elders have been taken cared of and how,” she said.
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