When an older person who has finished discharge procedures has not decided where to return to, Cheongyang has ten rooms. They are the 'in-between home' on the third and fourth floors of the Cheongyang Gyowol senior welfare housing. Five units for men, five units for women. They take the form of a share house with a shared living room, kitchen and bathroom, where residents can stay three months to begin with and up to six months with an extension.
The press group visited the site on the 22nd. It was the 100th day since Cheongyang County began running integrated care in earnest. The main project for integrated medical and long-term care opened across the country in March this year, but Cheongyang raised its hand as a community integrated care pilot local government in 2019, seven years earlier.
As of May this year, 12,902 of the 30,081 residents are aged 65 or older, or 42.8 percent.
This building, a rental apartment of 127 households supplied by LH, does different work on each floor. On the first floor are a social welfare center and the county office's care policy team, and on the second floor are a home medical care center and a day care center. The third and fourth floors are the in-between home, and the fifth through tenth floors are general residential space.
It is counted as the country's first convergence case, attaching the Ministry of Health and Welfare's community integrated care to the senior welfare housing project of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and LH. It opened in September 2023, and 17 people have passed through the in-between home so far.
The work also goes outside the building. The 'visiting medical center', operated since 2020, tours 170 villages in medically underserved areas. These are villages where it takes half a day to get out to a hospital in town without a car. Operating tasks inside the building such as the convenience store, cleaning, safety management and meal service are bundled into the senior jobs program and taken on by residents and older people living nearby.
To run this system, Cheongyang County overhauled the organization of its health and medical center and drew up new county ordinances. Alongside this it runs a method of selecting 833 people who have difficulty with daily life because of frailty or disability as subjects for intensive management and connecting medical care, long-term care, housing and welfare. On the ground there were also voices saying staff are short and workloads heavy.
The same week, a similar agenda item was handled at the National Assembly's Environment and Labor Committee.
The Presidential Special Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural Policy held the second TF meeting on development measures for rural and fishing village style community integrated care on the 24th. Dr. Cho Mi-hyung of the cooperative Hamkkehaneun Yeonguso reported the results of the first on-site inspection for the integrated care policy study, and Cheongyang County's 'Da-Dolbom' rural agreement operating system was also shared at the meeting that day. TF member Lee Jeong-yeong presented the case of the Baegun Integrated Care Social Cooperative in Jinan County. The committee discussed how to apply on the ground the agenda item 'Measures to improve the delivery system for elderly care services in rural and fishing areas through the establishment of rural and fishing village style care centers', which was resolved in February 2022.
The same day, Minister of Health and Welfare Jeong Eun-kyeong headed to Jeonju. She held a meeting at a city hall conference room and visited the Pyeonghwa-dong independent living support housing to review community independent living support for people with disabilities and integrated care projects. Jeonju was selected in 2022 as a region for the Ministry of Health and Welfare's pilot project on community independent living support for people with disabilities, and since then 35 people with disabilities have left facilities and settled in the community.
The Jeonbuk State Solidarity for Independent Living of People with Severe Disabilities, which has run the project, received a commendation from the Minister of Health and Welfare in 2023. Jeonju was selected as the best institution in the 2024 evaluation of the pilot project. The city said it will widen the integrated care system, which it has built mainly around older people, to people with disabilities and thicken the support system connecting housing, medical care and care.
Older people in Cheongyang and people with disabilities in Jeonju are in different circumstances. Both places set as their goal letting people keep living in the area where they have lived rather than entering facilities.
Cheongyang's population once fell to the 29,000 range and then rose back above 30,000. How the seventeen people who passed through the in-between home are doing since then, and how the list of 833 will be managed from here, are matters for the next phase. The agriculture committee's TF has just received the inspection results, and Jeonju's plan to expand to people with disabilities is now entering design.
