Beijing mulls new regulations on home-based nursing service

Beijing's top legislature appointed a special group focused on the elderly on Thursday, in an effort to ensure a regulation targeting at home-based nursing can be implemented.

The Standing Committee of Beijing Municipal People's Congress set up the group, consisting of 39 deputies, on Thursday morning and held its first press conference to explain its work plan for this year.

The deputies, from the capital's 16 districts, cover different fields, such as education and medical care, and include leaders working for communities.

In January, the legislature passed a regulation on the city's home-based nursing services, which will be effective from May 1. The group's establishment is aimed to push the enforcement of the regulation and find problems."All of them provided proposals about home nursing in the past and always paid attention to the issue," said Yuan Fang, the group's head and the deputy director of the committee's legal office.

"These members will participate in our research on elderly work, helping the standing committee improve the regulation," Yuan said. "Meanwhile, they are required to collect and solicit opinions from residents, especially senior citizens, and supervise the regulation's implementation."

Liu Weilin, director of the standing committee's legal office, echoed Yuan and further explained the group's main tasks this year.

"The major work is to research how to provide better services for the elderly in communities, in a bid to collect experience and specify the regulation," Liu said. "After all, the regulation now is the rule with 17 principles, which needs us to seek specific measures to effectively enforce it."

For example, the regulation says that every community should solve the nutrition problems of senior citizens whose children do not live with them. "But what food can be provided for the elderly and how to ensure the food safety should be still taken into consideration," Liu said.

Beijing, as an aging city, has more than 3.21 million residents over 65 years old, "so the rule's enforcement is important for the city" , he added.

Zang Meihua, the secretary general of the Beijing Silver Industry Association, said the emergency in the home-based nursing means there is to increase the number of nursing workers and improve their quality.

"There is a big shortage of nursing workers across the country now, and most of them have not been trained in professional schools," Zang said, adding her association has issued a book to teach how to care for the elderly and will provide special training for those who want to enter the market.