Macau Matters | Caring for the Elderly – I

Richard Whitfield

Along with many other parts of the world, Macau has to cope with a growing elderly population. Continuing improvements in healthcare and food availability mean that people are living longer, while living cost and social pressures mean that younger people are having smaller families, later in life. The net effect is a rapidly rising proportion of older people in the community.
This changing demographic profile is putting additional and increasing pressure on healthcare and social support services.
Personally, my increased need for medical services and drugs (for heart and other issues) and my future needs for surgical “repair” work (hip replacement) as I age is very noticeable. I have also begun noticing the problems in Macau’s healthcare system and can already see that these problems will increase. Medical support in Macau seems to trail world best practice by a significant margin and the quality and quantity of local medical professionals is often sub-par. Many seem to have limited English, for example, which is a significant concern because it is the global language for science and most medical research results are published in English. Given Macau’s wealth, I believe that the government needs to greatly expand the healthcare budget and make it much easier for internationally qualified healthcare professionals to practice here.
A related issue here is for the government and the healthcare system to be much more open and transparent so that much more information about the overall health of the community and the performance of the system and the people working within it is available. This is the only way that residents can make informed and reasonable healthcare decisions. Generally, I believe that the Macau government is far too secretive, a common symptom of bad government.
Social services, and especially those for the elderly, are mostly provided by charitable organizations in Macau. In many cases the services provided are not professionally managed, are poor and very limited. Again, there seems to be a “cone of silence” surrounding these services so that very limited information is available most Macau charities do not publish annual reports, for example.
The government’s social welfare department does provide significant funding to local charities but only seems to be interested in ensuring that photographs of charity recipients do not show identifiable faces, and has no interest in ensuring that the community gets good value for the funding provided or that services improve over time. This is a very stark contrast with the quality of the oversight of charitable organizations in Hong Kong, where their government does a much better job.
The provident fund system in Hong Kong for providing retirement benefits also seems much, much better than what we have here in Macau. My combined employer/employee retirement fund contributions in Hong Kong were several thousand per month, but only a few hundred per month in Macau, for very similar work situations. They have been talking about improving the local situation for years, but it seems to be yet another case of endless talk and no action. In Macau we deserve better.
As a Macau resident I get the annual government handout but this is a very poor substitute for a good public provident fund system for retirement benefits. Given the lack of reasonable retirement support, unless you are a public servant in which case the retirement benefits are very good, the old age pensions in Macau are particularly miserly. The government seems to be very happy to look after retired civil servants at the expense of the rest of the community, which does not seem fair or reasonable to me.