Recently, the government announced that the Shared Stay-In Senior Caregiving Service will soon be introduced as a mainstream option. This is an excellent initiative, for seniors to live together and share access to caregiving staff.
But it seems it will be left to private companies to manage and run. As a sandbox initiative, five companies served a total of 232 clients, according to the health ministry.
In 2023, the ministry said that around 100,000 seniors will require help with at least one daily living activity. It would be necessary for the government to step in if private companies cannot scale to meet this need, especially if it wants to reframe nursing homes as part of a broader ecosystem, rather than a place where older Singaporeans “end up”.
Some higher-income families, including those in private housing, may make ad hoc arrangements that come close to assisted living – hiring a domestic helper, engaging part-time caregivers, or retrofitting homes for ageing. But they are not substitutes for purpose-built assisted-living communities.
A domestic helper model, for instance, places significant responsibility on a single caregiver, often without medical training, and does not provide the social and communal environment that structured assisted living can provide. As family sizes shrink and care needs increase, this model may prove fragile.
Even if the higher-income can afford such arrangements, the point is that assisted living should not depend primarily on individual households assembling private solutions.
Instead, if assisted living is to be a pillar of our ageing policy, Singapore could consider clearer regulatory frameworks, land-use planning incentives and integrated care standards that enable professionally managed assisted-living communities – whether public or private – to operate at a meaningful scale.