An elderly woman dines at a nursing home in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. (SUN YIDOU/CHINA DAILY)

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Eight provinces released legal measures to tackle aging care by allowing children from single-child households to ask for leave to look after parents in need of medical care. The provisions vary in terms of duration of leave and whether employees are paid a full wage.

Fujian and Heilongjiang provinces both allow adult children to have paid leave to take care of their parents or grandparents. The duration of leave is no more than 10 days per year and in Heilongjiang Province, the time can be extended to 20 days for an only child. Employees who are an only child in Fujian Province can benefit from this regulation when their parents reach 60 years old and receive treatment in hospitals while Heilongjiang Province sets no limitations on the seniors’ age.

Employers in Hubei Province are also obligated to make accommodations for their workers when they need to stay with elderly people incapable of taking care of themselves or hospitalized. The duration is 10 days at most per year and no more than 15 days for an only child. However, the province hasn’t clearly legislated that wages or benefits of employees must be paid during their leave.

Currently, about 7 million people are aged 60 years or older, accounting for 18.5 percent of Heilongjiang’s total population, according to statistics from the Provincial Working Commission on Aging. And the situation tends to develop in four directions. The average longevity is growing while more adult children are migrating to other places to study or live. At the same time, more seniors, with fewer children around them, are losing the ability to take care of themselves. The percentage of one-child families is relatively high in Heilongjiang Province, making elder care a social issue. The investigation conducted by the working commission shows that the paid leave mechanism can help to relieve the pressure on an only child to care for their parents when they are hospitalized.

For Dong Ke, a professor from Renmin University of China, the massive number of elderly people in the country has led to greater difficulties in supporting seniors. “Seniors can receive treatment in hospitals for either a short or long term, but undoubtedly they require urgent medical care from family members or their children. The possibility and frequency of hospitalization may increase as they grow older,” Dong said. The new laws are a testament to humanity, but various problems may occur during implementation. Employees should provide detailed and accurate information while employers need to conduct careful examination, which adds to the labor costs of workplaces, he added.

The new measures are a crucial way to tackle the ongoing aging problem by overcoming the most obvious shortcomings through legislation, said Dang Junwu, deputy director of China Research Center on Aging, suggesting that “Financial departments at the national and local level need to properly subsidize with the purpose of reducing companies’ pressure.”

With the release of elderly care leave, attention have been paid to the issue that how one-child families and the entire society should react to deal with the nearing ageing era.

The one-child generation should make full use of social forces when facing difficulties in elderly care. “For example, hospitals have strict visiting hours and provide medical and daily care for seniors. Domestic hospitals should adopt a more legitimate management pattern to alleviate the burden of one-child families,” Dong said.Dang agrees with Dong, adding that Chinese people once expected their children to take care of them when they got old. However, in many cases their offspring fail to do so because they live in different places or they are too busy to look after the seniors.

China has made progress in combining medical treatment and elderly care, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs statistics. More than 93 percent of elderly care centers provide various forms of medical services, and 46 percent of beds are provided for seniors who require nursing care, whereas the figure was lower than 30 percent in 2015.

“The involvement of elderly care homes and social forces is a step forward. Seniors in one-child families can freely choose how they want to live. We all hope that elderly people can spend their twilight years in comfort,” Dang said.

 

The article was edited and translated from Guangming Daily.

(edited by MA YUHONG)