In line with the willing to guarantee a Social Protection Floor (SPF) for all, social protection was chosen in Thailand as one of the six key areas of the partnership between the Royal Thai Government and the UN system within the United Nations Partnership Framework (UNPAF) for the period 2012-2016.

Within this framework, an assessment was made to describe and measure existing social protection schemes and programmes in Thailand and make recommendations to expand them. Concerning the elderly, one of the main recommendations was “to  design and establish a long term social care insurance system in cash or in kind; this system may include: the coverage of the cost for home-based care for all ages, including financial assistance for informal caregivers, who are mostly women, the establishment of more elderly care centers (so far Thailand has only 20 of them), the implementation of volunteer-based home care programme involving non-government agencies and the private sector, the scaling up by local authorities of the community-volunteer caregiver for older people programme initiated by the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, and so on”.

To date, Thailand has a comprehensive health care system and a minimum allowance for the elderly not covered by public pension schemes. Different projects and systems of long term care, mostly informal, already exist. However, those systems need to be sustainable, harmonized, adapted to the demographic and social changes occurring in Thailand, and seen through an holistic approach which would gather the different Ministries involved (Ministry of Public Health, Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, Ministry of Labour, Ministry of finance, Ministry of Interior etc.).

In that purpose, in 2013, the Thai government and the UN Social Protection Floor team will collaborate with the GIP-SPSI (France – public interest group for international health and social protection) through a series of missions of a team of French experts who will share experiences on a regular basis, help with the assessment of the current situation and bring additional expertise in the process of designing and building a sustainable long term care system for the elderly in Thailand.