After officiating the Asean+Republic of Korea Conference on Care and Support for Older Persons on Monday (June 30), Women, Family and Community Development Minister Datuk Seri Nancy Shukri told reporters that the government would expand its technical and vocational education and training (TVET) programmes for caregivers in the country.
She added that the country had relied too much on foreign caregivers and it is time to produce more qualified caregivers of its own.
00:00Our biggest challenge toward becoming an aging nation is to address the issue of financial security among the older persons.
00:10A signified number of our older persons are facing retirement with inadequate settings.
00:17The rising cost of healthcare and specialized long-term care places and immense burden on families,
00:25many of whom are already stretched thin as the sandwich generation caring for both their children and their aging parents.
00:35But I think if you have heard this before, when I came in, I must say that we started talking about caregiving industry
00:43and then training our first giving up-skilling for our own caregivers, our care workers in our own ministry.
00:54The second challenge is our healthcare infrastructure. This is another area.
00:59There is a critical shortage of trained professionals, as I mentioned, in geriatric care, from specialists to daily caregivers.
01:08Korea is very happy to work with Malaysian Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development.
01:16Not only because Korea is a strategy partner of Malaysia, closely cooperating with each other, but also Korea is working collectively together with ASEAN countries as a whole.
01:30Actually, today's conference is not a Korea-Malaysian conference. It is a Korea-ASEAN conference on the care and support of older people. Why?
01:42Because this aging society and caring and supporting older people is not just a matter of one country. It is a common challenge and common issues that all countries in the region are facing.
01:58So, sharing knowledge and sharing experience and cooperating with each other to address these common challenges is very important.
02:08So, the next plan will be, inshallah, to try to recruit more of those who will be interested in you to work with more on the TVED program for caregiving.
02:19I think that is another way of giving awareness to those who are looking for jobs and maybe give them that awareness so that they know that it is something that is very noble to do.
02:34And, of course, in terms of salary, actually, this is a very potential area. Quite a number of institutions even come looking for us to help them to look for those who are interested in this industry.
02:46So, therefore, we take this seriously. It is already an ongoing process as I've mentioned earlier on. We have already started with our own staff.
02:53We want to do more. We want to give them the up-skilling courses and also to give them a better qualification so that they will be able to value their own qualification, the certificate or the degree, whatever they have, for them to bring around to this industry.
03:15We want to bring around to get better jobs. And this is something that we are really in need of because there are quite a number of people in our country that are relying on other countries.
03:27Yeah, we don't want to just rely on other people. It's time for us to have our own. Then we are already working on it and with the hope of giving speedier work on this so that we can get more as fast as possible.
03:43We want to take care of ourselves. Thank you, Paul.
