Health Care of Senior Citizens

Fulfillment of health care needs of senior citizens is one of the major factors contributing towards promotion of healthy and productive ageing, especially in a country like India where population ageing is becoming a reality. Though family is the primary caregiver, government has a major role to play in the provision of such services especially for elderly belonging to lower and lower middle class.

Population ageing in India has brought with it some serious changes like increase in population of oldest old (80+), feminization of ageing, emergence of living alone among elderly as a new living arrangement and financial constraints which many senior citizens face due to improper saving for old age and due to increase in longevity. The four factors mentioned above emphasize on the fact that there is a dire need for provision of more need based healthcare services by the government to various sections of elderly population, such as oldest old (80+), older women, mainly widows, elderly living alone with little or no support from their family and elderly below poverty line.

While I was working in the UNFPA-ISEC-IEG-TISS Ageing project in which a survey was conducted on 9852 elderly residing in seven states of India, we found that there is low awareness and utilization of health related schemes such as health insurance schemes and Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana among the elderly. This was mainly due to inadequate information among elderly and wrong targeting of the schemes. All this raises demand for immediate actions to be taken by the government towards provision of effective health related schemes to elderly, especially those below poverty line. The full report is available on the UNFPA, India website, Report on the Status of Elderly in Select States of India, 2011 - http://india.unfpa.org/?publications=5828
 
Recently, during the 11th Five-Year Plan period, government has come up with The National Programme for the Health Care of the Elderly, which is an effective and useful step towards provision of preventive, curative and rehabilitative services to elderly at various levels of health care delivery system.

Along with government, civil societies have a major role to play in provision of various health related schemes by training the senior citizens to get aware of such schemes and by guiding them in availing such services.

Point to discuss: In addition to the existing schemes what steps government should take to address this issue?