International Day Of Older Persons

NEWS COMMENTARY ON THE INTERNATIONAL DAY OF OLDER PERSONS

Despite ongoing social change, traditional reforms of care such as kin providing, long term care for frail older people in Ghanaian families remains a moral imperative. It is a belief that instructs children to honour parents during old age as filial responsibility to attract future blessing. However, given dwindling birth rates, prevalence of divorce, increased single-parent households and more children living far from their parents, the place of adult children or relatives who provide long term care for frail older parents are given little attention by government as well as religious institutions, as to how they managed.

To clarify, data on family about caregivers for frail older persons in Ghana is nonexistent. At the same time, the social environment for practising traditional forms of care is associated with increasing unemployment among the youth and rising cost of living such as for health care, accommodation among others.

There is the need therefore to re-envisage family long term care of frail older persons as a concern not only for older people as recipients but also the emotional, financial social and economic wellbeing of adult children and relatives who attend to them.

The 2019 UN theme for the international day of older persons is: “The journey to Age Equality” with one of its sub-themes as the care sector-as a Contributor of Decent Work. It is intriguing to emphasise that access to the provision of long-term care for frail older persons within families reproduces inequalities of many kinds.

Despite the very dependent nature of frail older persons, their care needs are highly unpredictable and may be provided over several years due to rise in life expectancy-63.91 for Ghana. Care of frail older persons even gets intricate with the age-related loss of hearing, loss of sight and movement as well as associated cognitive ailments such as dementia and Alzheimer’s to injuries from fall.

Markedly, most long-term care for frail older persons within families are provided by women and girls. Such care work is done without organised training and generally received little rewards or not at all. The economic and emotional challenges associated with such caregiving can be vast and whether the care is provided directly by adult children, relatives or hired individuals, the prolonged caregiving may affect health, social life and economic constraints of a caregiver which can lead to unreliable quality of care by whoever may be responsible as full time workers of self-employed.

Although options for long term care have been introduced in Accra, their operations do not cover the entire country.

There are few institutionalized care choices and the trained orderly options that provide care in recipients home. However these have not been fully recognised as they exist as private participation and tend to be an elitist system. Notably, these opinions are commercialized in nature and therefore can scare majority of adult children who might not be able to afford. There is also the tendency within the traditional realm to attach stigma to the system and be it as it may, relatives will be tempted to adhere to the moral obligation despite personal cost.

It is in this vein that given the theme for the year on equality and care as decent work, government should update Labour regulations on rewards received by hired care workers for frail older persons in families and help develop policies to include organised training and counselling for caregivers at hospitals and be empowered in their emotional constraints in this area of care giving.

BY DR. SARAH DSANE, A RESEARCHER.