중국의 노인부양과 요양간호제도

Abstract

In China, the elderly support or long-term care has been traditionally performed by the elderly's son or daughter. Recently, however, the family function of the elderly long-term care has been largely weakened due to the rapid aging and nuclear family. China does not have well-maintained system like medical security system, pension system, and the minimum standard of living security system while there is no unified system of the elderly health/welfare like long-term care nursing support. Therefore, there are only basic measures such as support by family, provision of long-term care service by local community, and purchase of service by individual users. Under the goal of being equipped with the elderly nursing security system based on the trinity of state, society, and family, China has local social welfare service as a basic strategy to complement the family support ability weakened by the low-birth and aging, which is the local service based on the maintenance by residents' mutual aids. However, the social security system focusing on the local system has several problems like that the local community service is locally irregular, that the local community service as a welfare system has such limited service quality and unstable security of finance, that the number of staffs equipped with expertise and ability of long-term care is lacking while the level of professional nurses is low. In order to improve them, first, the rural areas should also establish the social security system just like the urban areas, and it is also necessary to input the government finance to enforce the rural medical social security system including long-term care. Second, Third, it is also required to introduce the long-term care-related qualification system in the aspect of fostering the talent in the welfare-related area like persons in charge of long-term care, on top of the expansion of the public long-term care facilities.