July 31, 2024
KUALA LUMPUR – A 70-year-old stroke patient has not seen or heard from his family for nearly five months since he was admitted to the Lotus Ville Care Centre in Johor Bahru.
His immediate family, which includes his wife and two children, has not been footing the RM2,000 (S$576) monthly bill for his care at the nursing home for three months, after paying for one month upfront in March when he was admitted.
“It was part of a plan by my wife and children to put me in an old folks’ home because they did not want to deal with me themselves,” claimed the man who wanted to be known only as Mr Kumar, citing privacy reasons.
The Malaysian, who used to work as a bus driver, believes they can no longer bear the burden of caring for him. After a stroke five years ago, he became dependent on his family to feed him and take him to the bathroom.
Mr Kumar’s attempts to call his family have been in vain as they have changed their phone numbers, and he can’t come to terms with how they have abandoned him. Despite it all, he still harbours hope of reconciling with them.
“I hope one day I can meet my wife and children again to ask them why they left me like this when I became dependent on them,” he told The Straits Times.
Anecdotally, predicaments like Mr Kumar’s are becoming more common in Malaysia, with industry players also seeing an increase in cases of the elderly being abandoned at their premises.
The ageing population in Malaysia stood at 7.4 per cent of its 33.7 million population, or about 2.5 million people aged 65 and above, in 2023. The figure is expected to rise to 4.5 million by 2030.
The Association for Residential Aged Care Operators of Malaysia (Agecope) defines cases of elderly abandonment as instances where families fail to visit their elderly relatives and stop paying the monthly fees for their care.
Most old-age homes that ST spoke to said they usually write off the unpaid fees for seniors in such situations out of goodwill.
Trinity Care Centre owner Dass Lourdes said: “I have an abandonment case, but I am keeping him out of sympathy. At least in our home, he is getting proper care.”
Mr Santok Singh, owner of Golden Peacock Care Centre in Penang, has seen two abandonment cases in the last five years.
He said the elderly at his nursing home were left by their families because they faced financial constraints.
Mr Singh said that if the person is sickly, the cost of care could well be high.
Citing the case of a 60-year-old cancer patient, Mr Singh said his family stopped paying the RM1,900 monthly fee after two months and became uncontactable. The patient remained at the home for seven months until he died in 2020.
Mr Singh told ST that he managed to get in touch with the patient’s family after his death, and they claimed his body for the funeral. But they could not afford to pay the accrued fees.
It is not just private facilities that experience cases of abandonment. Government-run hospitals have also reported cases where families admit their elderly relatives and then become uncontactable.
Hospital Kuala Lumpur (HKL) saw a 50 per cent rise in patients being abandoned over three years, with the 239 cases in 2020 rising to 358 cases in 2023. In the first five months of 2024, around 166 abandoned cases were recorded in HKL, local media reported.
Some 50 per cent of the cases involved patients above the age of 60, with the remainder being younger patients with medical complications. A majority of the patients said they did not have relatives, HKL Social Work Department chief Zulhan Ambi told The Star.
Nationwide, more than 2,100 senior citizens were abandoned at hospitals from 2018 to June 2022, said then Deputy Minister for Women, Family and Community Development Aiman Athirah Sabu in Parliament in March 2023.
There have also been cases of Singaporeans abandoning their parents in aged-care centres in Johor Bahru.
The owner of a nursing home in Johor Bahru, who declined to be named to protect the privacy of his elderly clients, said there had been two such cases at his centre in the last decade.
One was a 70-year-old Singaporean woman who was sent back to the Republic because the family had accrued an overdue payment of more than RM20,000 over 12 months, he said.
The other, an 80-year-old Singaporean woman, has been in the home for about a decade. Her son pays a token sum of around $500 a year, which does not cover the cost, but the home continues to care for her out of sympathy.
“I feel the children have money, but they don’t want to pay… I continue to care for (the 80-year-old woman) because her son, who is in Australia, requested me to keep her, although he only pays one month’s worth of fees per year,” said the owner.
On July 26, in response to queries about updated annual statistics of abandoned seniors, the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development told ST that in May 2024, there were 39 such cases in government-run welfare homes. This is despite the fact government-run welfare homes are free.
The government currently provides RM500 per month to those aged above 60 under Malaysia’s senior citizens assistance scheme, which helps those with no source of income or with a family that cannot support them. The government also provides RM500 per month to families taking care of disabled or sickly senior citizens, and caregivers of sick abandoned seniors.
The government operates 11 welfare homes in Malaysia that cater to roughly 2,000 senior citizens without charge, said Agecope. It estimates there are about 2,000 private aged-care facilities in Malaysia.
Agecope president Delren Terrence Douglas said about 25,000 elderly individuals, which make up 1 per cent of the country’s senior citizens, are in need of care in old-age homes.
The majority of the 25,000 are among the lower-income group who were admitted to private old-age homes and subsequently abandoned because their families could not afford the fees, he added.
“Since there is limited space in government welfare homes, the government should appoint and pay private old-age homes to support the senior citizens who are abandoned,” said Mr Douglas.
There have been attempts by the authorities to tackle the issue of the elderly being abandoned by their families, and the government is expected to table a Senior Citizens Bill in 2024 to protect them.
In March 2023, Ms Aiman said the government was considering taking action against irresponsible children of aged parents, though it remains unclear if this will involve penalties or a law to cut the salaries of unfilial children.
On July 26, the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development told ST: “The proposed suggestion is that the Bill should protect the welfare and basic rights of senior citizens as well as create a strong support system, and empower both the seniors and their family members.”