"Preventing Solitary Deaths Among 50s and 60s"... Local Governments Take Action

High Proportion of Solitary Deaths Among Middle-Aged and Older Men
Songpa-gu Partners with HY
Yangcheon-gu Increases Related Budget by 20%
Gwangjin-gu Manages 3,000 High-Risk Individuals

A care public official from Yangcheon District Office in Seoul is visiting the home of a solitary elderly person to inquire about any inconveniences. (Photo by Yangcheon District Office)

Songpa-gu, Seoul, signed a business agreement last month with HY (Korea Yakult) to deliver health drinks to middle-aged single-person households and detect warning signs as part of a solitary death prevention project.

This method was devised in response to the steady increase in solitary deaths among middle-aged people due to aging, the rise of single-person households, and polarization. According to Songpa-gu's data, over the past five years up to last year, solitary deaths among people in their 50s and 60s accounted for 83% of all solitary deaths. Most of them belonged to the impoverished class with no jobs and low income levels. The situation is not much different in other urban areas.

Solitary death refers to a death where a person living alone, isolated from those around them, passes away due to suicide, illness, or other causes and is discovered as a corpse after a certain period of time. Every year, 1 out of 100 people quietly ends their life through solitary death, with men in their 50s and 60s making up half of these cases.

Since the Ministry of Health and Welfare first released statistics related to solitary deaths (2022 Solitary Death Survey) in 2022 and began formulating countermeasures, local governments have also been actively promoting prevention measures.

The “Health Drink Check-in Project for Middle-aged Single-person Households,” a pilot project to be conducted this year by Songpa-gu and HY, is considered an ideal example of public-private cooperation. HY’s Gangnam branch delivers health drinks to 150 high-risk solitary death households while checking on their well-being. A total of 196 HY managers (delivery workers) deliver fermented milk three times a week, a company-sponsored meal kit once a month, and welfare information leaflets to confirm the safety and health of the recipients.

If warning signs such as uncollected yogurt or unusual situations occur, they immediately notify the local community center or report through the district’s hotline called “Songpa Hope Talk.” Songpa-gu also runs a welfare registered mail project targeting households suspected of being in crisis as another public-private cooperation effort. This year, Songpa-gu will implement 40 detailed projects across four areas to prevent solitary deaths and address social isolation issues.

Seongpa-gu, Seoul, and Echiwai signed a business agreement last month for the "Health Drink Check-up Project for Middle-aged Single-person Households." (Photo by Seongpa-gu Office)

Yangcheon-gu announced that it has established the “Yangcheon-type Solitary Death Prevention and Social Isolation Household Support Plan,” which includes 25 isolation prevention measures across four major areas, and plans to invest 3.9 billion KRW, nearly 20% more than last year, in the related budget.

Single-person households in Yangcheon-gu account for about 32% of all households, of which 55.7% are middle-aged people aged 50 and above classified as at risk of solitary death. Yangcheon-gu focuses on identifying households with accumulated mail among single-person households to detect easily overlooked warning signs.

Additionally, Yangcheon-gu operates the “Together Finding and Discovering Team,” composed of about 1,000 local community members (including workers in daily life industries, local social security councils, and neighborhood leaders), and promotes projects such as AI telephone check-in services, smart plugs that detect dangerous situations through changes in electricity usage and lighting, and safety management solutions that use the Internet of Things (IoT) to monitor movement, humidity, and total volatile organic compounds in real time for about 500 safety-vulnerable elderly households.

Yangcheon-gu also runs the “Single-person Household Support Center,” which helps with counseling, education, leisure culture, and social network formation for single-person households, as well as “Care SOS,” where care managers assess welfare needs and provide welfare services such as temporary home care, accompaniment support, and meal delivery. In the second half of this year, a pilot project for solitary death prevention will be launched to support check-in items for selected high-risk individuals.

Gwangjin-gu recently selected 3,000 high-risk solitary death individuals within the district and plans to implement customized prevention policies targeting them. In addition to checking on single-person households, they have devised supplementary measures to address the complex causes of solitary death. The plan is to prevent solitary deaths through improvements in living environments, formation of social networks, and post-management.

Kim Kyung-ho, mayor of Gwangjin-gu, said, “We are devising detailed support measures tailored to the characteristics of the target groups to prepare for the increasing risk of solitary death every year,” and added, “We will build a dense welfare network so that marginalized neighbors can connect with the local community.”