Creation of a unique and humanized “Elderly Counseling” service to accompany caregivers in facing elderly problems
HONG KONG SAR 29 December 2023 – “Harvest Care” is pleased to announce that in 2024, we will launch an upgraded version of the Elderly Advisory Service, and continue to build up a team to effectively match the elderly with various elderly services, to enable better allocation of social resources to the needy. We will also extend the service to the Greater Bay Area, and provide better support to the elderly through new services such as “Virtual Home Visit Experience”.
Proper allocation of healthcare resources in the private market is one of the key initiatives of the HKSAR Government in its policy blueprint. In 2024, ” Harvest Care” aims to dovetail with the Government’s strategy, and is committed to coordinating the cooperation and communication among elders, carers, business operators, nonprofit organizations, and the Government, as well as launching an upgraded version of the Elderly Advisory Service, which will cover the following three major directions:
(1) Elderly Consultancy Services Expanded to the Greater Bay Area
The emergence of “Harvest Care” and the Elderly Consultants has strengthened the deployment and utilization of elderly resources in the community, and the platform has collaborated and communicated with more than 200 residential care homes and more than 300 care service providers. As a result, “Harvest Care” has been recognized by the industry, winning the Gold Award of the Elderly Service Platform organized by the Trade and Industry Department, the Creative Proposal Award organized by the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, and a grant from the Hong Kong Productivity Council. As the Hong Kong Government promotes the Greater Bay Area cross-boundary elderly services plan in the future, local elderly services may also need to look northward. Harvest Care will launch a relevant program in 2024, using the cross-boundary passage of “Hong Kong Express to the North” to support the elderly and their family members to visit residential care homes in the Mainland. In addition, Caring for Your Home has been consolidating big data information in the hope of making it more convenient for users to obtain the resources they need. It also provides a “Virtual Residential Care Home Visit Experience”, which is a VR-based virtual reality that allows the elderly to get a glimpse of the environment of various elderly facilities without having to travel and to make related arrangements remotely with the assistance of the Elderly Consultants.
(2) More humanized configuration
Elderly people, as well as their relatives and friends, can browse the “Harvest Care” website to find the services and resources they need or make appointments to meet with elderly counselors. After receiving a case, “Harvest Care” will carry out several stages of assessment. The first step is to find out where the real problem lies, for instance, the elderly counselor will examine whether the elderly have any disagreements with their family members or whether they are financially stable. After that, the Elderly Consultant will provide one-on-one support and accompany them to deal with their problems, analyze their financial and care needs, and finally determine a humanized care plan. Larry said, “For example, many elderly people fall accidentally at home, and their family members or caregivers will take them to the Accident and Emergency Department of a government hospital for treatment of their injuries. For less serious injuries, the elderly can return home to recuperate after treatment. However, falling at home is not a simple matter, it involves a lot of nursing, convalescence, and rehabilitation procedures, and at the same time, it is crucial to prevent the same thing from happening again. The team of Harvest Care can play a very important role in analyzing the situation for the caregivers and giving them professional advice on how to make the elderly have a better recovery, and how to set up a more comfortable and safe environment for the elderly, to prevent the next accident from happening.”
(3) Upgrading and mobilizing the use of elderly resources
There are two types of social needs for elderly services in Hong Kong. Firstly, the elderly generally do not know much about the elderly caring information in society, and carers usually hustle looking for solutions to the problems they encounter, but the problems still cannot be solved, so they desire a simple and convenient platform to choose services; secondly, there is a lack of effective matching of elderly resources in the society, and the development of services and products for the elderly has become more and more diversified, which end up the elderly may be confused and can not choose the most suitable services and products. Moreover, due to the constraints of non-profit organizations or government departments, they are unable to provide independent advice to the elderly, and the most common example is that the elderly do not know which medical product merchants offer concessions. Given this, “Harvest Care” has newly launched the upgraded Elderly Consultancy Service to capitalize on the trend of popularization of smartphones and online services, and to provide tailor-made one-to-one support to the elderly and their family members. At present, Harvest Care’s Elderly Consultancy Team consists of professionals including nurses, social workers, financial planners, psychotherapists, and mediators. We will continue to expand this year and actively communicate with government departments to improve the public-private partnership model and continuously optimize the elderly services in the community.
Socially oriented, the original intention of consulting service remains unchanged
Regardless of how we utilize technology or grasp social trends, Larry emphasizes that the original intention of “Harvest Care” will never change and that in the future, we will strive to integrate all kinds of social resources to provide carers with more choices and flexible one-on-one elderly consultancy services.
Official Website: https://harvestcare.space
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