Why it matters. Every country is aging, and most of the world's older people will soon live in developing nations — making a shared definition of decent elder care a global concern, not a wealthy-world luxury.
Background. South Korea is one of the fastest-aging societies on Earth and runs a public long-term care insurance scheme through the National Health Insurance Service, which hosted the forum Jang attended. Korean elder care has traditionally leaned heavily on family duty, rooted in Confucian filial-piety norms, and the country launched a nationwide 'integrated care' program in March 2026 to shift support toward homes and communities.
What to watch next. The WHO standard goes through consultation and revision through late 2026 before a final 2027 release that governments may use to benchmark their own care systems.
A First Attempt to Define ‘Good’ Elderly Care Worldwide
The World Health Organization (WHO) has released a draft of the first international standard for long-term elderly care and opened it for global consultation, an effort to give governments a shared benchmark for dignified aging as populations grow older everywhere. Jang Hyo-beom, a WHO medical officer based at the agency’s Geneva headquarters who led the standard’s development, explained the project during an interview in Seoul on June 4.
The 267-page draft was published in May and is now being reviewed by officials from member countries. After a year of feedback and revision, a final version is expected in 2027. It marks the first time an international body has set out criteria for what older people should be able to expect from their care.
Aging Is Not Just a Rich-Country Problem
Jang challenged a common assumption: that population aging is a concern only for wealthy nations. By 2050, he noted, roughly 80% of the world’s older people are projected to live in developing countries. Yet until now there has been no international reference for what quality elder care actually looks like.
Rather than imposing rigid numbers — such as a fixed ratio of staff to residents in a facility — the draft deliberately avoids one-size-fits-all targets, since national systems and levels of development vary widely. Instead, Jang said, it frames broad expectations: what an individual receiving care should be able to count on, and the minimum a government or care provider should guarantee. The emphasis shifts away from facility- and provider-centered care toward supporting older people to live where they choose, with dignity, autonomy and the ability to make their own decisions.
Care Should Not Rest on Families Alone
One of the draft’s clearest messages is that the burden of elderly care can no longer fall solely on family devotion. It devotes separate chapters to unpaid family caregivers and to paid care workers. Unpaid family caregivers exist everywhere and shoulder an enormous load, Jang said, yet their work is so informal that even its social and economic cost is hard to measure. He argued that families should be recognized as people who themselves need support — even where firm scientific evidence is still lacking.
The draft also calls for improving the quality of care jobs. Where care work is low-paid, precarious and stripped of professional recognition, Jang said, good care cannot be sustained — making the shift toward decent care employment a global priority. It further identifies state oversight systems and stable financing structures as core tasks for governments.
How Korea’s New System Measures Up
Asked about South Korea’s integrated care program, which began nationwide in March 2026, Jang said its direction is sound. Its push to strengthen home- and community-based care, and to bridge the gaps between medical, nursing and social-care services, aligns with WHO’s goals. He singled out the role of the “care coordinator” — a dedicated worker who links and arranges services so users do not have to seek each one out individually — as essential to making integrated care function in practice.
