Gom Mirian
The National Senior Citizens Centre (NSCC) in has started the process of standardising guidelines and frameworks to end the isolation of health and social care for older persons in Nigeria.
The Director General of NSCC, Dr. Emem Omokaro, disclosed this on Tuesday at a two-day National Workshop on Development of Older Persons Care Quality Assurance Policy Guidelines and Regulatory Framework.
The workshop was organised by the agency, in collaboration with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, (UNDESA).
Speaking on challenges facing elderly care in Nigeria, she noted that “the shortfall in the availability of family caregivers, lack of incentive, gross inadequacy, and non-existence of systems and processes, as well as the lack of explicit guidelines, among others, has made the provision of care for older persons consistently inappropriate.”
To address these challeneges, she continued, the NSCC is working towards integrating quality supervision, as well as “monitoring and evaluation of services across the continuum of care provided to older persons to meet their social, medical, economic and personal needs.”
The United Nations (UN) Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria, Matthias Schmale, in his contribution, said that even though the Nigerian society is known for taking care of its older persons, this is no longer so over time, due to changes in the society and modernisation.
“I came here thinking we don’t have to worry because Nigerian society takes care of its older people in their homes. Although there are still families that do that, a part of the education journey is that this is true to some extent, but it’s over time beginning to change.
”I pay tribute to the NSCC and others for making us all realise that times are shifting and there is a need to evolve systematic ways beyond the family as to how we take care of older people in the society,” he said.
