'HOME CARE' SYSTEM FOR ELDERLY MORE SUITABLE FOR RI : MINISTER

Yogyakarta, Apr 22 (ANTARA) - The concept of "home care " for elderly people is more suitable for Indonesia than the practice of putting them in senior citizens' institutions, Social Services Minister Bachtiar Chamsyah said.

"Conform with a deep-rooted belief of the Indonesian people that a person grows in wisdom with age, they prefer to take care of their elderly at home," Chamsyah said after opening an ASEAN-Korea Regional Conference on Home Care here on Tuesday. .
When taken care of at home by their own families, elderly people would not feel discarded or cast away as they would in an institution for the aged, he said.
The minister said at present only 71,000 elderly people or less than 10 percent of the number existing in Indonesia was under the government's care. The number of elderly people under government care needed to be increased with the community's participation, especially so because the number of elderly people in the country was growing at a rapid rate, namely 11.1 percent per year.
If the care of elderly people was not handled maximally, the country would eventually face many problems, including an increase in the poverty rate, Chamsyah said.
According to data compiled by the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS), Indonesia had 17 million senior citizens in 2005 but the figure was estimated to rise to 23 million by 2015 and 28 million by 2020.
At present, the number of elderly people in Indonesia was about 19 million with 2.5 percent of the number categorized as poor or neglected.
The minister said the government was hoping to be able to apply the home care system for the elderly in all of the country's 33 provinces by 2011. But he failed to explain what role the government played in the home care system.
At present, he said, the home care system was already in place in Yogyakarta, NAD, Jakarta, Central Java West Kalimantan, West Java and Lampung.
The ASEAN-Korea Regional Conference on Home Care is being attended by delegates from Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.