Customized food and medication shopping administrations for seniors
Angelica Caballero used to cheerfully push her shopping streetcar by the bridgeway that associated her townhouse to SM North EDSA for her every day needs and supplies. She found the ideal home in Grass Residences – with its walkable access to the shopping center, a clinic and simple drive to significant lanes – particularly for an old like her who lives alone.
Be that as it may, with the pandemic and the ensuing lockdown, access to provisions end up being troublesome, with numerous stores shutting or working with constrained hours. What's more, as a senior resident, she was not permitted to go out, nor would she have needed to wander out of her unit.
Caballero is one of in excess of 100,000 people matured 65 years of age or more, who are living alone, in view of the 2015 Census of Population information.
Commission on Population and Development Undersecretary Juan Antonio Perez III has approached barangays and network pioneers to find these elderlies so they can be given fitting help. "Like never before, the test for inclusivity during these difficult occasions requires the foundation of productive systems to effortlessly find defenseless populaces, for example, the more seasoned people who are living alone," Perez said in an announcement.
Elderlies are among the gathering of people rendered powerless against Covid-19 on account of constrained physical versatility, expanded powerlessness to diseases, lower injury edges and higher recuperation times. Without a non-old grown-up to buy their food and medication for them, a significant number of them are compelled to leave their homes for week after week basic food item and medication runs.
The Good Guys to the rescue
Luckily for Caballero, The Good Guys care group, made out of workers from SM Development Corporation (SMDC), calls her consistently to help her with her basic food item and medication needs.
The Good Guys care group is a gathering of volunteer SMDC representatives who normally call chosen inhabitants to give shopping administrations to elderlies who live freely. The group takes their requests – alongside their Senior Citizen ID cards, remedies, medication booklets and approval letters – and organize these to be purchased by a group of riders who carry them to the townhouse's entryway monitor, who conveys them to their doorsteps.
The activity is a piece of a greater program called The Good Guys, propelled in 2019. The program conducts network building exercises across SMDC properties, going from crisis readiness trainings to family fun days called Happynings, to wellbeing and health talks and sports and wellness exercises. A key sub-part of the program is one that concentrates on the elderlies, PWDs and other helpless gatherings.
At the beginning of the lockdown, The Good Guys group quickly got together to distinguish the difficulties that SMDC inhabitants could be looking because of the lockdown. Workers rushed to offer an answer for address the necessities of elderlies living alone. They did a speedy output of the old SMDC occupants, who either lived alone or were living with individual elderlies or with minors.
The program has been running for right around two months, overhauling nine SMDC properties over the capital.
'Blessed messengers' accessible as needs be
For Renie Ignacio, there were no ifs ands or buts. She and her 86-year-old spouse Tony were not going to hazard leaving their unit, not with her better half's respiratory condition. Food was not an issue for them as she approached the basic food item and dinner conveyance administrations accessible in her Trees Residences townhouse in Fairview, Quezon City. In any case, upkeep prescriptions were an alternate issue by and large. So she was very much glad to get a call from The Good Guys group offering to deal with her and her significant other's medication flexibly.
"Our youngsters are happy that we live in this network where we approach everything that we need during this lockdown, and there is consistently somebody that we can bring in the midst of crises," Ignacio describes. She and her significant other had unfailingly gone to all The Good Guys workshops, trainings and wellness meetings, pre-Covid. "We love this network. We realize all the administration staff, we have companions here, and we truly feel we are being dealt with," she shares.
This individual shopping help program is both advantageous and reasonable for some older inhabitants as some of them don't have a grip of the subtleties of web based shopping or electronic banking. Everything is masterminded them – from request taking right to conveyance. No applications to be downloaded, no rounding out of electronic structures, no unsafe e-installment plans.
For Milagros Autencio of Breeze Residences in Roxas Boulevard, who does internet shopping, there is an additional advantage that this program offers. "In view of the volume of requests that online shops are getting and the transportation restrictions of the lockdown, it takes a couple of days for my requests to show up," she brings up. "Yet, with this program, I can have my staple and palengke things and nutrients the day that I request them," she says.
Things are conveyed that day they are requested, or, at any rate, inside 24 hours. Not even Typhoon Ambo, which hit the nation a month ago, could stop the Good Guys riders from conveying pre-requested basic food item and medication things, provoking Eleonor Martinez of Field Residences in Sucat, to state: "You are not just Good Guys; you are holy messengers too."
Social connection
This program may have begun as a straightforward shopping help for the powerless, yet it has advanced to fill another significant need. Having somebody call them all the time gives these elderlies the feeling of network that they have been missing.
Analysts caution that elderlies living alone, particularly during this pandemic, may experience the ill effects of social separation. Their social world decreases and their chance to socially interface with others diminishes. An article distributed as of late by ABC News focuses to contemplates indicating a connection between "tenacious sentiments of social seclusion and forlornness with higher danger of building up certain psychological and physical wellbeing conditions like coronary illness, hypertension, tension, melancholy and even unexpected passing."
That is why members of the SMDC volunteer care team regularly call them, even just to ask how the week had been for them. SMDC employee Annie Diche shares that an elderly couple from Sea Residences in the MOA complex would oftentimes send her text messages just to express gratitude for this service, even when they have no orders for that day or week. “It is so heartwarming to know that this small volunteer work that we are doing is making such a huge impact on our senior residents,” she says. Many of these volunteers end up engaging these elderlies in long conversations, and they are only too happy to lend an ear.
Crises have a way of bringing out the best in people. What may seem like a simple act of kindness can lead to a multitude of benefits, not only for those it aims to serve but also for those who serve. It is in times like these that the Good Guys truly come into being.