Shu-Ching Chang

The elderly population in Taiwan is rapidly increasing in the past 20 years. In 2018, Taiwan has become the aged society.(the percentage of elderly is more than 14%). The more elderly people leads to a steady increase in the number of people in needs of long-term care services. In order to build a comprehensive long-term care system, the National Ten year Long-Term Care Plan was launched by the MOHW in 2008. Under the increasing and diversification of demand for care services, Taiwan needs to provide a wide range of integrated services that extend from family support care to home care, community care and residential care, along with the establishment of community-based long-term care service networks. In order to meeting the long-term care need of aging population, in 2016 the MOHW undertook planning for the National Ten-year Long-Term Care Plan 2.0 that is an integrated community care service network and was launched in November 2016, and formal implementation began in January 2017. With constructing the comprehensive community care service system to prioritize the expansion of home care provision and make day-care more widely available, the MOHW has been working to integrate different services into community-based integrated care service networks. The basic principle involves the cultivation of community integrated service center ("A"), combined service center ("B"), and LTC stations around the blocks ("C") throughout Taiwan. The objectives of the Long-Term Care Plan 2.0 are as follows: At the front end, optimizing the primary preventive function, integrating preventive healthcare, promoting active ageing, and slowing down the determination of cognitive impairment, and enhancing the health and wellbeing of senior citizens and improving their quality of life. At the back end, providing multi-function community based services, and integrating these services with home-based palliative care to ease the stress suffered by family members and to reduce the care burden. In addition to implementing pilot projects and developing innovative services, the MOHW is also working to build a community-based healthcare teams network, and is expanding the scope of service provision to include hospital discharge planning services, home-based medical care, etc. Key work items include increasing the flexibility of existing Long Term Care Plan 1.0 services, expanding the number of target service recipient categories from 4 to 8, and expanding the number of service items from 8 to 17.