Recently, the first Shanghai Elderly Care Patient Companion Training program started at Shanghai Open University. The training is aimed at providing caregivers for the elderly in Shanghai with professional and systematic patient accompanying knowledge, meeting talent requirements of professional patient companion services, and improving the quality of home-based elderly care services in Shanghai.

This training is open to elderly care staff from community-based integrated elderly care service centers, elderly care homes, elderly day care centers, nursing stations, and related elderly service institutions in Shanghai. The training, which comprises basic knowledge of elderly care services and skills of patient companion services, covers the process of patient accompanying service, medical consultation process and precautions, psychological care and communication with the elderly, companion service standards and legal responsibilities, etc. This training program will be carried out in several batches. Some 500 people from 16 districts in Shanghai will be trained this year under this program according to the plan.