| James Kon |
THE Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports’ (MCYS) Senior Citizens Workshop for Action Plan on Senior Citizen Issues, held in conjunction with this year’s International Day for Older Persons celebrations, came to a close yesterday with the passing of a resolution gathering ideas, recommendations and opinions on senior citizen issues in the country.
Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports Datin Paduka Dr Hajah Norlila binti Dato Paduka Haji Abdul Jalil was the guest of honour.
The resolution, presented by Dr Hajah Ra’yah binti Md Ali, covered a number of areas of concern to the country’s seniors, such as finance, health, religion and community.
Under the financial aspect, the resolution proposed that senior citizens should be allowed to borrow money from banks under the condition they repay the amount within a reasonable period, enacting a government policy to bring more comfort to the people, establish programmes or seminars on financial literacy for senior citizens, allowing seniors who are still healthy to work, increasing the old person pension rate by 100 per cent to BND500, providing allowance to disabled senior citizens, increasing transparency within the government with regard to the release of information on senior citizens, streamlining the government sector service system for seniors, and conducting day courses on entrepreneurship for seniors.
From a religious standpoint, it was suggested that there is a need for the Brunei community to be more proactive in improving the administration of matters relating to religion for the good of senior citizens. For example, the management and administration of mosques and religious activities should be more efficient and organised.
In terms of community, it was put forth that there should be some sort of policy covering the care of seniors in villages or rural areas. The creation of a senior citizens bureau for each village consultative council to gauge the skills or unique expertise of each senior citizen has also been mooted.
Other suggestions include organising activities on household management and youth programmes where the youth can discuss issues faced by seniors in villages.
On the aspect of health, a number of suggestions were proposed. These include giving seniors priority for immediate treatment, grouping senior citizens from all districts into one single health programme to foster closer relationships between them, increasing healthy living awareness among seniors by conducting appropriate seminars, establishing a one-stop centre for senior citizens, and creating a webpage for senior citizens to voice out any issues of grievances they might have.
