Shanghai has established a blacklist for senior care homes found abusing or bullying residents, which have serious accidents or conduct illegal financial activities, the city’s civil affairs authorities announced yesterday.

The first blacklist will be announced around theDouble Ninth Festival in October, which is on the ninth day of the ninth month in traditional Chinese calendar and a day to cherish senior citizens, according to the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau.

The list will be made public regularly every year and provide reference when people choose facilities for the elderly.

The names of good senior care homes will also be made public, it added.

In addition, a monitoring system with 90 evaluation indexes covering all 700-plus senior care homes has been set up.

“The monitoring results are shown in four levels, namely excellent (big smiling face), good (smiling face), common (flat face) and bad (crying face), which is easy to recognize,” said Zhu Qinhao, the bureau’s director. “We will order senior homes to rectify within a certain period if problems are found.”

The results will be made public in December this year.

“They will reveal whether the services provided by these homes for seniors are standard and quality.”

Meal supply

Shanghai had registered 712 seniors homes with 144,000 beds by the end of last year. There were 180 comprehensive community-based senior service centers with day care, meal services and medical functions by the end of last year, and another 155 community-based senior homes providing full-day, short-term respite care for seniors with between 10 and 49 beds.

Shanghai will have more than 400 comprehensive community-based senior service centers and 1,600 canteens for the elderly by 2022, and the latter will feed 160,000 seniors, 5 percent of the aged population, by that time.

There were 815 such canteens by the end of last year supplying 80,000 meals a day.

“Seniors with physical disabilities, living alone, or with financial difficulties get priority in meal supply,” said Zhu. “Catering businesses and company canteens are encouraged to provide affordable and diversified meals to seniors.”

Subsidies will be provided as incentives for senior canteens, said Zhu.

There should be 200 new venues providing meals for the elderly by the end of this year, according to the bureau.

By the end of 2018, Shanghai’s senior population was 5.03 million, more than 34 percent of residents with Shanghai hukou, or permanent residency. Among them, 816,700 were 80 or older. Average life expectancy in the city was 83.63.