I thank Mr Kuldip Singh Saggi (Caregivers are the unsung heroes of society, Oct 28) and Mr Vincent Lim (Professionally certify home-based caregivers, Nov 2) for supporting my suggestions.

To enact a well-calibrated and robust policy that compensates informal caregivers and professionalises caregiving, a second national study on informal caregiving should be conducted.

This study should look into the health, well-being, costs and opportunity costs of providing informal care to older adults in Singapore, and answer difficult questions such as the following:

How many informal caregivers are there in Singapore? What items do they pay for out of pocket to provide care to an older adult at home, and at what cost? How can caregiver burden be quantified and addressed in a sustainable way? What technical competencies have caregivers acquired owing to caregiving, and at what levels of proficiency?

My academic research found that caregivers of stroke survivors who were distressed at the start had a 24 per cent probability of remaining distressed at the 12-month mark post-stroke.

My proposed national study would include a time dimension, and ask if this trend applies to caregivers of other care recipients and if it persists over a longer time horizon.

Apart from answering these questions, a national investigation into informal caregiving could also point to potential solutions to yet-to-be-resolved issues surfaced by the 2010 Survey on Informal Caregiving that was commissioned by the former Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports, such as employed caregivers facing heavy demands on their time.

Some of the above questions were raised in Parliament but were not adequately addressed due to lack of data. With a longitudinal national study that considers variations in informal caregiving arrangements, subsequent parliamentary debates on this topic would become more insightful, and consequent policy solutions would be evidence-based.

Wayne Freeman Chong (Dr)