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    19 April 2024
    The dining room of the 124-year-old Kowloon Bowling Green Club was empty and silent as LIFE+ sat down recently to chat with Dr Edward Leung. Picture perfect Gunners, ordered by the doctor, sparkled in their tankards atop the white linen tablecloth, as business cards were exchanged.
    Dr Leung introduced himself as the President of Hong Kong Association of Gerontology, a body established almost 40 years ago, at a time when the young doctor was embarking on his professional journey into geriatric medicine. But Dr Leung is a man of several business cards, and many titles. Read one of the various biographies prefacing his frequent domestic and international speaking engagements, and you start to get a sense of a long career dedicated to his fascination for improving the latter stages of life.
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    Initially founded by a group of professionals working in Aged Care in 1986, Edward and his colleagues transformed The Hong Kong Association of Gerontology into an organisation to not only study the issues around geriatrics, but also provide training, accreditation, and advice for bodies, companies and individuals seeking to improve elderly care.

    A turning point for the Association was when in 2002 the Government wished to improve the standards of the previously unregulated residential care home industry, and they turned to Dr Leung and his colleagues for help.

    Photo: Dr Edward Leung

    “We performed a two-year pilot project to examine overseas accreditation systems in Canada, Australia, the US and the UK,” explained Dr Leung, “and from that, we developed a set of standards and an accreditation process.”

    From this first step, and now there are more than 300 residential care homes accredited by the Association, their levels of service and care having been assessed, providing residents and their families predictability and peace of mind.

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    "For older people, loneliness is a serious threat to their wellbeing, and loneliness is usually a result of retirement."

    More recently, for the past five years, Edward and his team have turned their attention to the rapidly increasing proportion of Hong Kongers aged 65 or more, a community due to double in size over the next 25 years.

    “Unfortunately, in Hong Kong, retirement age is fixed,” explained Dr Leung. “If the Government would promote more flexible retirement, changing from full time work to 75%, 50%, to 25%, people would have time to find other activities and different leisure interests, to help with the change from full time working.”

    Currently, 95% of Hong Kong’s elderlies live at home, the majority in dense multi-level apartment buildings, however of these, 13% live alone, a major concern for the Association. “As humans, we need to be connected,” stressed Dr Leung.

    But those connections can be very limited in old age. However, the doctor and his colleagues have identified residential estate management workers as being an underutilised touch point in the lives of singleton elderlies.

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    Therefore, the Association of Gerontology has begun providing training programmes for property management personnel and is working with Chinachem Group and other developers to enhance the service offered to elderly residents in regular apartment buildings.

    Like the residential care home accreditation they pioneered, the Association of Gerontology, led by the irrepressible Edward Leung, is again laying the groundwork for a city population going through a significant societal change.

    Back in the dining room, the Gunners are drained, and the silence has been replaced by the buzz of activity. Groups of elderly men at tables chatting excitedly, women ‘of a certain age’ having lunch to discuss the week, and couples quietly reading the newspapers together. This vignette perfectly mirrored Dr Leung’s desired future. And with some help from the private sector and Government, he will no doubt continue to postpone his retirement to achieve it.
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