Geriatric medicine unit to be national model
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THE Public Health Ministry marked National Day of Older People yesterday by vowing to speedily turn the Supreme Patriarch Nyanasanwara Geriatric Medicine Institute into a national prototype for medical treatment for the elderly.
The move is in response to forecasts that Thailand will become an ageing society by 2025, meaning 20 per cent of its population will be elderly.
Thailand had just over 10 million elderly people according to a report by the National Statistical Office last year and that total is rising by 500,000 a year, Public Health Minister Rajata Rajatanavin said.
He said 95 per cent of the elderly had chronic health issues, ageing ailments or mental health problems, especially depression. As Thailand would become an ageing society by 2025, the government had to prepare for that to ensure the elderly had good quality of life, he said.
This year, the ministry is taking care of seniors through four schemes:
Providing free dental checks and free false teeth or dental implants after a survey found 250,000 elderly Thais had no teeth;
Arranging a long-term care system for dependent seniors via training 500 care managers and 2,500 caregivers;
Adding 15,000 family care teams to visit bed-ridden seniors at home, raising the number to 30,000 by the end of the year;
Organising health promotion activities for middle-aged people to give them a better chance of becoming healthy seniors.
As part of the national elderly plan (2002-2021), three strategies were implemented – preparing citizens for quality ageing; promoting the establishment of elderly clubs in all sub-districts and 818 elderly clinics at state-run hospitals; and providing a social protection system for the elderly including better access to ramps and secured toilets.
