A volunteer takes care of a patient at the hospice ward in the Beijing Chaoyang Hospital. Wang Yixuan / For China Daily
Only one large hospital in Beijing runs a ward for terminal patients
For the past year, 82-year-old Li Jing, who has end-stage rectal cancer, has been lying in a ward at the Beijing Geriatric Hospital, her body connected to several different plastic tubes, unable to make the slightest move.
Her upper body lies flat, her eyes watching through her glasses, but her left leg is curled and slightly angled, unable to stretch out, pitching the blanket covering her knee like a small tent.
Li, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, is fed five times a day. Her nurse prepares the food, vegetables and eggs, in a blender and the fluid is directed to her stomach through a soft tube connected at her nose.
"She cannot speak, but she can hear and understand my instructions," said Wang Jinyan, Li's nurse at the hospital's hospice department.
"She used to be a professor at a top foreign language university in Beijing," Wang said. "She gets nervous easily. She gets scared even when we try to turn her body gently to clean her back."
Besides Li, another 27 people, most of them older than 80, are patients in the hospice ward, Wang said. Some are in extremely poor health condition and are on life-support.
The patients receive conservative treatment to relieve pain, which is aimed at helping them live their final days in a relatively peaceful way.
"All of them are critically ill, suffering diseases such as end-stage cancers, brain hemorrhage and heart failure, and were sent here by their families from their homes or from ICUs after their conditions stabilized," head nurse Zhao Bingyun said.
"Their families who sent them here would not want them to receive invasive end-of-life treatment and they hope they can spend the rest of their lives with a little more dignity," Zhao said.
Shortage of services
Since the hospital's hospice department was created in 2010, only a handful of seniors receiving care have recovered and returned home, Wang said.
"But they are miracles," she said. "Most of the patients die in the hospital."
The hospice ward is the only one of its kind at a large Beijing hospital and every bed is occupied. The hospital is planning to add more such hospice wards, and the number of hospice care beds is expected to increase to about 50 in the near future, said Yang Yingna, a hospital publicity official.
"Families of patients have to reserve a bed months ahead," Zhao said. "And the people sent here are becoming older and older."
Ma Yanming, an official at the Beijing Municipal Commission of Health and Family Planning, the city's top health authority, said hospice care has been a thorny issue for years, and the provision of better hospice care is becoming more urgent due to rapid aging in the city.
"It is difficult for many other hospitals to open hospice departments," he said. "A few years ago, we planned to set up hospice care in more big hospitals, but many hospitals are reluctant to do so."
Ma said there are many reasons for the lack of hospice care in big hospitals, including higher costs due to more intensive care, resulting in lower profits for hospitals.
"A normal patient stays in the hospital for just a few days," he said. "But an end-of-life patient can stay in the hospital for months or more than a year."
