Calls to add specialised visa category for caregivers coming to Hong Kong
Specialised carers coming to Hong Kong to work for the elderly face lengthy delays as they must apply for domestic worker visas
When Wong Mei-ling hobbled out of the hospital after a brain tumour operation and facing a long road to recovery, Nirmala was waiting for her.
With nine years of experience as a hospital nurse in her native home of Sri Lanka, Nirmala was the reason why Wong dodged the fate of being put into an elderly care home, the 62 year old said.
Nirmala is one of almost 60 caregivers with nurse training employed by Hong Kong families from Sri Lanka and India through Active Global Specialised Caregivers, who brought them over using the foreign domestic worker visa. But the Singapore company’s Hong Kong branch manager, Steven Chiu, said Hong Kong’s domestic worker visa is proving a problem for the business, because it takes two and a half months to process, which means families who need immediate help in caring for an elderly person would not get it.
In comparison, it only takes two weeks to process a similar application in Singapore, where the business is booming, said Chiu.
“The best is to have a visa category for caregivers,” said Chiu, who said differentiating hires with expertise in caring for the elderly would also help to make the job more respectable. “The biggest problem right now though is the visa processing time.”
Chiu said many of the company’s clients looked to them as an alternative to putting the elderly into an elderly home, especially when the care needs of the elderly involved exceeds that a domestic worker’s training.
