ELDERLY CARE BIZ.

Today someone i knew came quietly with the intention to study and explore the possibility of opening an assisted living centre. I knew her purpose and i knew she came from a very renown private hospital. They have home care. And as usual because they have so many staff, money, resources and what not they are exploring.

But I can tell you that going into elderly care is a total different  animal, one must understand ageing, they must understand what business it is and why it is not a business for the faint hearted. It is harder than a hospital in some ways.

Point blank is that home care structure and business is different from that of daycare. and day care is very different from assisted living centre and independent living centre is different from assisted living centre.

There are people who wants to build a 3 stage retirement village from independent to , dependent to high dependent. This tells me that they don't understand ageing in Malaysia. They learned from overseas experience which if Australia is a bacon and eggs culture, if japan it is a sushi and sake culture but in Malaysia we are capati, wan ton mee, nasi lemak culture. We are different.

There is not short cut to cut and paste any model into your business. I don't like to call age care a business because then the elderlies are just consumers and we are selling a product. And people go into all these high fly marketing and branding which in operational reality means nuts.

I like to start debunking the difference of each of the above care needs.

Home Care - almost 100% of people do not like to age in a centre, and home is the preferred choice. I strongly suggest that people stay at home, because they deteriorate slower. Because their home has the smell, feel, touch and familiarity that reminds us of who we are and where we are.

But home care can be expensive and sometimes the family members saw that the home care does very little, only 20% to 30% of their time are actually caring for the elderly. Ad you have a stranger in your house.

Assisted Living Centre - This can be high care or just assistance for those with mental, medical and physical needs. it is generally more economical than home care, but it has its limitation. The place is not familiar and they elderly lose control and ownership and the sense of belonging.

Independent Living - is well really not necessary a retirement village which i am against, for now. it could be anywhere, you don't need to pay a bomb. It could be just your own current house.

Daycare is a different business all together, the client are usually mobile who just need company for the day, very much like a children's day care, full of activities for 8 hours or so.

Dementia care- this is a totally different from all the above, you need to have trained and competent staff to manage the elderly and the right systems and SOPs to deal with situations like ramming their head against the wall, climbing the fence and what not.

The differences in all the above care model are:
1.  Staff with right abilities
2.   Target clients differs.
3.    SOPs differs
4.    Operational models differs.
5.    Cost of investment and equipments differs.

Back to the opening story of a friend from a big corporation looking at investing into  elderly care my advise for her was, "Your organisation needs a major mind shift"  The reason being that big organisation are always out there to make the big bucks, their lingo is always let us corner the market. But elderly care is not something where we approach the usual corporate all guns blazing method. Elderly care is about the conditions of the hearts and not just the mind.

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