The Elderly to Wear 'Help Me Up' Card in NE China

A citizen in Harbin, capital city of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province shows her 'Help Me Up' card. [hljnews.cn]

About 100 citizens over the age of 70 in a community in Harbin, capital city of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, have started wearing a 'Help Me Up' card recently, in case they fall down outside.

The 'Help Me Up' card is 11 cm long and 8 cm wide, on which there is the elderly citizen's photo, date of birth, history of disease, four words reading "Please help me up" and a statement on one side and on the other side a phone number of the citizen's relatives, the citizen's residence and the emergency number.

According to the law, the words "Please help me up" on the card are the senior citizen's invitation to any passersby to help, meaning that the passersby are not responsible for the results.

Staff members in the community said that the card is convenient to wear and that passersby can decide to offer help or not according to the elderly citizen's history of disease and contact the citizen's relatives in time using the phone number on the card, which will help solve the problem of not being able to find the elderly citizen's relatives.

The community has been distributing the cards to citizens for free since June 11.

Recent years have seen a series of disputes between good Samaritans and senior residents in China, leading to the fact that helping a fallen senior citizen is a difficult decision to make.

In June 2013, an old woman broke her leg when she fell in the street in Dazhou, in southwest China's Sichuan Province and then alleged that three children who helped her had knocked her down. She pressed the children's families to pay her medical fees of about 20,000 yuan (U.S. $3,202). The father of one of the children reported the case to the police who announced three witnesses verified the woman wasn't pushed but fell.

A China Youth Daily survey in 2013, which surveyed 139,010 people, showed that more than 80 percent of respondents said they would hesitate to help a fallen elderly person for fear of potential disputes, and that more than half said they would walk away from such a situation while only 5.4 percent would offer help without hesitation.

(Source: heilongjiang.dbw.cn/Translated by womenofchina.cn)