Social Innovation for Healthcare within Community Care Depots in Middle Taiwan

Abstract

Community care depots have been employed for more than a decade in the Taiwan area as a healthcare subsidy program. By using social innovation business models developed indigenously, the elderly care services were borrowed to satifice the needs of the aged. The independent sector services provided by voluntary workers are coordinated with the staffs and social workers as well as the public servants to work together as a team to help those vulnerable seniors within civil society. However, the social participation and social rights for their livelihood quality and life styles are highly appreciated for their rest of life. In the past years, an indigenous community care depot business model has been generated as community enterprise contributed to the sustainable donating system for the healthcare services provision to the senior citizens within the aged society through proactive outreached calling, public health visiting, meals-on-wheels, and health promotion programs nationwide. As one kind of social enterprise characterized by 1 spectrum (along corporate social responsibility), 2 bottom-lines (including social and economic as well as ecological), 3 commodities (products, services, and ideas), 4 sustainability (in governance, finance, management, and innovation), and 5 accountability (in balanced, open, transparency, close-related, and due diligent), community care depots regarded as social enterprise must be socially innovated an abundant business model for sustainable business, people are encouraged to be working as volunteers for the provision of a comprehensive and integrated services system to the aged locally based on care management. Empirically speaking some the developing trajectories could be drawn and used as social innovation business model for investing the future as a sustainable business for social entrepreneurs.