(ECNS) — Many of China's care centers said they were suffering extra economic pressure from those who sent their elderly parents there and then vanish into thin air, a dilemma they had yet to find a way of resolving, Henan Business Daily reports.
According to media reports in 2014, the elder son of a woman surnamed Chen at a nursing home in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province regularly visited her and paid relevant fees. However, her younger son had only paid a few visits to the center before his death from illness last year. The woman owed nearly 20,000 yuan ($3,052) to the nursing home, and had no way to contact the son.
Another woman, surnamed Zhang, had stayed at a care facility in Urumqi for more than 10 years. Her children paid her service fees but seldom visited. Besides, she never went home to spend holidays or festivals with her children.
The paper said such cases in which children abandoned their elderly parents at care homes frequently happened in China. And agreements on fees and visits, and even court rulings, were useless when care services had no way to get in contact with those who had abandoned their parents after paying a small amount of service fees.
"Most care services in Zhengzhou are private businesses," said an executive surnamed Guo from a local nursing home. "They already have many difficulties in running the business, and those who 'dump the elderly' make things even worse."
Wang Fei, an executive at Zhengzhou Yihe Elderly's Home, told the paper that following a similar incident a few years ago 11 local care homes had failed to figure out a good solution to the problem.
