Elderly parents, alone at home, suddenly taking ill is something many households worry about most.

Soon, family members in Beijing will feel less anxious. From now on, urgent call devices for medical rescue will be installed for senior citizens by the Beijing Committee on Aging (BCA) with the help of the Beijing Emergency Medical Center (BEMC).

Three kinds of high-risk groups of senior citizens will enjoy this service, including those who are over 80 and living on their own, those who have serious diseases and those who cannot take care of themselves.

About 20,000 senior citizens meet the requirements according to the statistics from the BCA.

"Some senior citizens are not able to make emergency calls when being attacked by diseases, or even they can, they may not be able to clearly tell where they are," said Cai Shuang, director of the Rights and Interests Department of the BCA, adding that the urgent call devices can help tackle these problems.

The device consists of two parts. One is a signal sender – a small box with a push-button control – that can be used by senior citizens to make urgent calls from anywhere when in need of emergency rescue.

The other is a signal receiver that is connected to a home telephone. It can automatically connect to the BEMC when receiving emergency signals.

Before installation, committees on aging in different districts will help collect senior citizens' basic information such as home addresses, medical histories and family members' contact information.

The collected information will then be entered into the BEMC's database.

After receiving urgent calls, the BEMC can take concrete and effective action immediately to provide medical aid for the elderly by going through the information in the database.

The information collection began on September 26. Senior citizens who live in Dongcheng Xicheng, Chongwen, Xuanwu, Haidian, Chaoyang, Fengtai and Shijingshan districts will be the first to enjoy the service within the next two years.

According to statistics by the BCA, there are about 1.97 million people over 60 in Beijing, constituting 13.2 percent of permanent residents.

By 2010, the number will increase to 2.17 million, amounting to 14 percent of the total.

(China.org.cn by Unisumoon, October 7, 2005)