The Macau Federation of Trade Unions (FAOM – aka Gung Luen in Cantonese) conducted a survey between August and last month regarding the demand for daycare services for senior citizens in the northern district, which found that 85.8 percent of 1,557 respondents expressed satisfaction with the overall service, with over 50 percent being in favour of expanding the scope of daycare services for the elderly.
In the hope of convincing the government to review the existing legislation concerning the implementation of temporary respite services for senior citizens, while also urging relevant institutions to expand their service area, scope and number of places, the group collected 1,557 valid questionnaires from local residents aged at least 18, with females accounting over 60 percent. The findings of the survey were released by representatives of the group, including its vice president Ella Lei Cheng I, a directly-elected lawmaker, during a press conference yesterday at its office in the northern district.
According to the findings, over 80 percent of the respondents expressed their satisfaction with the existing daycare services for the elderly in general, but 14.2 percent said that they were not satisfied with the services due to long waiting times to be accepted, inconvenient locations for the service facilities and their short opening hours, accounting for 50.2 percent, 56.6 percent and 42.1 percent respectively.
In terms of the services provided in the northern district, the findings show that fewer than 25 percent of the respondents considered daycare services for the elderly in the district to be “sufficient” or “very sufficient”.
The findings also show that nearly 70 percent of the respondents called for whole-day elderly services, while about 20 percent said that they needed to entrust their elderly family members to daycare service centres only in the afternoon.
The findings point out that the top three reasons given by 90 percent of the respondents for not using daycare services were “fear of the [expensive] charges”, “long waiting time” and “complicated application procedures”.
When asked in the questionnaires whether they were considering working in the sector, over 80 percent of the respondents said, according to the findings, that they had never thought of working as elderly caregivers, with about 50 percent saying that they did not know much or anything about the daycare services for senior citizens.
In view of the fact that, according Lei, over half of the respondents called for the expansion of daycare services for senior citizens, the relevant institutions were “strongly” urged by the FAOM representatives to provide temporary daycare services for the elderly within the scope of their services, enabling carers to ensure that seniors are properly taken care of when their families face an emergency.
Representatives of the Macau Federation of Trade Unions (Gung Luen in Cantonese), including its vice president-cum-directly-elected lawmaker Ella Lei Cheng I (third from left), release the findings of their group’s survey regarding the demand for daycare services for senior citizens in the northern district, during yesterday’s press conference at a Gung Luen office. – Photo: Yuki Lei
