Services and Facilities for the Disabled

Ms Denise Phua Lay Peng asked the Acting Minister for Social and Family Development if there are plans to set up more services, such as respite services, residential homes and day activity centres for the moderately to severely disabled adults in Singapore.

Mdm Speaker, many parents and families who have adult members with moderate to severe disabilities are concerned about the availability of care services. This is especially so when many of them are living longer and may outlive their care-givers. We also share and empathise with these concerns. Under the Enabling Masterplan 2012-2016, my Ministry will invest more resources and work with Voluntary Welfare Organisations (VWOs) to enhance such services.

We will develop more community-based facilities. Today, we have 19 Day Activity Centres (DACs) which provide 950 places for the adult disabled who need full-day care. We will increase this to 29 centres offering about 1,450 places by 2020. The first five new centres will be up within the next five years. We will also enhance the skills set of the Day Activity Centre staff so that they are better able to care for adults with moderate to severe disabilities.

This year, we also intend to pilot a new drop-in disability programme at existing community facilities. This will cater to those who do not require full-day care but social interaction and recreational activities for a few hours a day, a few times a week. We aim to start four pilots at different locations this year.

We will continue to support families who care for adult members with disability at home. We have introduced home care services which cover areas, such as personal hygiene and meals. About 600 families with disabled members have also benefited from the monthly $95 Foreign Domestic Worker (FDW) Levy Concession, while another 320 families with disabled members received the monthly $120 Foreign Domestic Worker Grant introduced last October. Family members or FDWs may also tap on the Caregiver Training Grant to pick up skills

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in care for the disabled.

Despite our effort to support home and community-based care, there will be some adults with disabilities who need residential care. The demand will rise given the longer lifespan of persons with disabilities. Today, we have eight Adult Disability Homes which provide 830 places. We plan to provide an additional 2,400 residential places by the year 2020. To complement the Adult Disability Homes, we also intend to work with VWOs to pilot group homes for persons with disabilities who are relatively independent. If successful, this will widen the residential options available.

Some of our efforts are in its nascent phase, while others are more established services being expanded. We will invest the necessary resources but we will need time to implement the plans. More importantly, we will need the support of the families and the community so that all the efforts put together will give parents and care-givers the peace of mind and enable our disabled to be well cared for.

Mdm Speaker, I thank the Acting Minister for the comprehensive reply. I wanted to ask if the Acting Minister would be able to, either now or later, provide a forecast of the requirements of this particular target group, which comprises mainly people who have more severe disabilities and who need special handling. There are three main needs in terms of setting up facilities: one is physical facilities; the second is funding, especially for the more severe cases; and the third – which is the largest bottleneck – is the manpower. Many local people do not want this kind of jobs because it is difficult and they have other choices, in terms of careers. I would like to ask the Acting Minister to provide, firstly, the forecast. Secondly, some segmented needs profile so that those who really need help but help is not easily gotten – like for this group with very severe disabilities – that we can use together to formulate some solutions. The VWOs are willing to work on them. We just need to be able to work with the Ministry on this.

Mdm Speaker, I thank Ms Denise Phua for her supplementary questions and suggestions. Yes, certainly, we will provide the forecast and we are working closely with the VWOs to meet some of these needs. The Member is right. The physical infrastructure is probably the easier part to meet. But more importantly is the funding of the programmes; and, most importantly, is the manpower requirement.

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For the funding of the programmes, we are open to working with more VWOs to pilot different sorts of programmes for different tiers of needs. As for manpower, as what we have described in other sectors, we are also looking at new sources of manpower to see whether we can open up more opportunities for people to contribute part-time services to this community. At the same time, in order to ensure that our manpower supply is robust, we would also need to explore alternative sources of manpower beyond the traditional countries that we have been working with.