Strengthened Care Support

Strengthening Support for Seniors with Care Needs

Beyond supporting seniors to age actively, we also understand that there are seniors who are concerned about being adequately cared for in their homes and in their community.

To strengthen support for frailer seniors and provide greater reassurance to family members, we are developing more options for seniors to receive timely and appropriate care right where they are.

Stay-in Shared Caregiving Sandbox

We will support private sector innovation to widen the range of care solutions for seniors to age in the community.

In September this year, MOH and the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC), with support from the Ministry of Manpower (MOM), launched applications for a sandbox to explore the viability of new stay-in shared caregiving models for seniors.

This will mitigate the impact on family caregiving that shrinking family sizes have brought about and offer more options for seniors, especially those living alone, to age in the community with care support.

We have identified five companies to be onboarded onto the sandbox, and they aim to serve an estimated 800 senior clients.

Participating companies will be supported through foreign manpower concessions to mitigate manpower challenges.

Seamless delivery of care

Today, seniors with multiple care needs may have to interact with multiple care providers and undergo repeated assessments from each provider. For example, they may need to interact with a day care centre, and also home care provider.

We will help seniors and their caregivers have a more seamless care journey by having a single point of contact to meet their multiple care needs from various providers. The point of contact will perform the role of a single bundled service provider, coordinating care across service providers for the seniors.

It will use a standardised care assessment tool, to plan and address the senior’s care needs. This reduces the need for multiple assessments and unnecessary referrals by different care providers.

These efforts to improve coordination in the sector will take place progressively from the second half of 2024, and in consultation with stakeholders.

Support for Caregiver Training

To make it easier for every Singaporean family to have a trained caregiver, we will enhance the Caregivers’ Training Grant (CTG).

From 2024, caregivers can tap on up to $400 in CTG subsidies per year, double that of $200 today. We will also allow caregivers to tap on their SkillsFuture Credit to pay for eligible caregiver courses, to further reduce the cost of training.

With these, we intend to scale up the number of subsidised training places for caregivers, to 4,400 each year across 200 courses. AIC and SkillsFuture Singapore will add more places if needed to ensure that the needs of caregivers are met.

Be trained and equipped early!