| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 公共事務管理研究所 === 104 === In response to the coming of the aging society, concepts of “aging in place” and “active aging” have received increasing attention. How to help the sub-healthy elderly to receive care and service in local communities and prolong their healthy aged life has been a major concern for practitioners and researchers. So far the care policies for the sub-healthy elderly in Taiwan have been promoted mainly through “community care center for the elderly”. Therefore, the current study aimed to examine the operation of community care centers for the elderly in Kaohsiung via three aspects. The study first probed into the application and terms of setting up such community care centers, then attempted to understand the underlying problems and policy needs in face of operational challenges, and last examined the effects of such community care centers on the elderly as well as the effectiveness of current evaluations on reflecting contributions from and problems of community care centers.
Administrative staff and volunteers in six community care centers were interviewed in the study for a deeper understanding of the overall operation and challenges in running community care centers. Governmental staff was also interviewed, hoping that opinions from the community as well as the government could be collected to examine challenges these centers faced. The results were as follows:
1. Difficulty in finding appropriate locations: The first challenge faced while setting up the care center was the search for appropriate locations. The study will findfound many problemscomplains in this regard, either that . For example, hinterland isthe available space was not big enough, too far from the community center, or that theis space was shared by too many communitiesis a multi-utility activities in common. However, care center is so difficulty to promote orThe location problem has created barrier to the elderly’s not easy to acuse cess to thcare centers, and at it leads to be unable to reachto realize the ideal of aging.
2. Challenges in center operation: Challenges and problems emerged in center operation and such challenges varied with communities. Three main challenges collected from the interview data included human source recruitment, funding, and willingness to participate among users.
3. Cognitive gap between the government and community organizers: When people promoting activities, peopleCommunity organizers always look forward some help fromexpect more resources and support from the government, whereas the . But there will be government expects community organizations to gain more sustainable resources from the civil societyparochialism cause the gap from thoughts between them. It should be arranged positiveThere should be more communications and consensus to decrease the gap between their conceptionstwo parties for the sake of the common good of community-based care.
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