Innovative Practice of the "School-Elderly Care Integration" Model from the Perspective of a Cross-Strait Community of Elderly Care Services

Abstract

Considering the rapid population aging, dilemmas exist on the supply of elderly care services such as structural imbalance between supply and demand, fragmentation of resources, and lack of professional capacity; traditional supply models can not cope with the increasingly differentiated care needs. As a fulcrum which plays the role of producing knowledge, accumulating human capital, and providing social services, educational resources has become an important lever to leverage the transformation of elderly care service supply. Based on the analysis from the perspective of the cross-Strait elderly care service community in China, this paper constructs the theoretical framework of the "school-elderly care integration" model based on the foundation of resource integration, structural characteristics of the model, and cross-Strait adaptation mechanism. The result shows that "school-elderly care integration" activates the service potential of educational resources through bidirectional embedding of industry and education and compounding of spatial functions, and the heterogeneous complementarity of cross-Strait educational resources provides incremental space for model innovation. Adaptation mechanisms should be established in terms of standard alignment, quality assurance, and collaborative innovation so as to iteratively upgrade the model via vertical extension and horizontal expansion of the service chain in order to sustainably operate the model.