Proposal to Update National Survey on Informal Care to Reflect Changing Care Patterns

Following the national Survey on Informal Caregiving in 2012, the Government continues to monitor the evolving trends of caregiving through research studies, such as the Retirement and Health Study by the Central Provident Fund Board and partner agencies, the Quality of Life of Caregivers study by the National Council of Social Service, and findings from social service agencies and other institutions such as Duke-NUS' Centre for Ageing Research and Education.

We also conduct regular engagements with partners and stakeholders. In 2018, the Ministry of Health (MOH) consulted over 200 caregivers, service providers, stakeholders and grassroots leaders on the needs of caregivers. Following this, MOH launched the Caregiver Support Action Plan in 2019 to address caregiving needs in the community.

We will continue to collect insights from studies and engage caregiving platforms to review the senior caregiving support landscape as they evolve.

I thank the Senior Minister of State for the reply. I just have a supplementary question. Would the Ministry consider committing to conducting a survey, say, every five years, because, obviously, the survey on caregiving is very structured. Or in the alternative, whether they can actually have a caregiving portion in the census so that we can have a very clear idea of how Singapore is ageing, the trends we are seeing, every time we conduct the census?

Sir, MOH does have regular touchpoints with partners and stakeholders in the care sector and also within the engagement platforms with many focus groups, residents through our grassroots networks and all.

I am not sure the Member's suggestion of doing a regular survey itself would achieve the intended purpose because caregiving can be quite different, where there are different needs for different segments. I think it is more important to be targeted in terms of reaching out to those who have direct nexus with caregiving and curate some of those insights in a more focused and deep way where it makes it easier for us to implement some of these measures in a more meaningful way, rather than do a broad survey that gathers broad insights, which may not exactly be applied to each different care setting. But we will continue to engage different partners and stakeholders to gain the insights as suggested by the Member.