Dementia advocacy groups yesterday urged the government and the public to take action against the rising number of incidents of people with dementia going missing, citing Taipei City Government statistics showing 179 incidents last year.
Fang Ting-gung (方定工), an officer at Nangang Police Station in Taipei, said on Sunday last week that older people with dementia might be “mentally stuck” in a time long ago, leading them to think that they must go to work.
This might happen in the middle of the night or in bad weather, which might imperil their physical health, he added.
Photo copied by Cheng Ming-hsiang, Taipei Times
While police use a facial recognition system to identify people with dementia they have picked up, the system only finds matches for about 50 percent of them, as there are no recent photos of them available in the system, Fang said.
Police officers might have to go from door to door to find a missing person’s home, he said.
Fang urged people with relatives with dementia to outfit them with tracker bracelets and install devices that prevent them from leaving home unaccompanied.
There are about 8,700 people with dementia in Taipei, but the Taipei Department of Health has only received 1,751 applications for tracker bracelets, or a 20 percent uptake, the department said.
It would continue to promote the bracelet program, collaborate with the police to establish a fingerprint database and is considering a subsidy for GPS devices for people with dementia, the department said.
Taiwan Alzheimer Disease Association secretary-general Tang Li-yu (湯麗玉) said that the families of people with dementia should adopt multiple measures, including updating the family member’s ID card with a recent photograph.
They should also notify neighbors that they have a family member with dementia so that they can help them if they wander off, Tang said.
They should also consider using daycare services, he said.
Federation for the Welfare of the Elderly secretary-general Chang Shu-ching (張淑卿) said that tracker bracelets have over the past few years become safer and more fashionable.
However, Taipei’s bracelet program is not integrated with those of other municipalities, and changing that would make it more efficient, Chang said.
The central government should increase efforts to educate the public on dementia, as the condition is expected to become more prevalent in Taiwan’s aging society.
The Ministry of Education (MOE) is to launch a new program to encourage international students to stay in Taiwan and explore job opportunities here after graduation, Deputy Minister of Education Yeh Ping-cheng (葉丙成) said on Friday. The government would provide full scholarships for international students to further their studies for two years in Taiwan, so those who want to pursue a master’s degree can consider applying for the program, he said. The fields included are science, technology, engineering, mathematics, semiconductors and finance, Yeh added. The program, called “Intense 2+2,” would also assist international students who completed the two years of further studies in
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
Taiwan will now have four additional national holidays after the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment today, which also made Labor Day a national holiday for all sectors. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their majority in the Legislative Yuan to pass the amendment to the Act on Implementing Memorial Days and State Holidays (紀念日及節日實施辦法), which the parties jointly proposed, in its third and final reading today. The legislature passed the bill to amend the act, which is currently enforced administratively, raising it to the legal level. The new legislation recognizes Confucius’ birthday on Sept. 28, the
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
RSS