Shanghai's hospice wards offer terminal patients a better last stop

Ten bedridden terminal cancer patients lie in the dimly lit, quiet hospice ward at the Jingan Temple Community Hospital in Shanghai. Most are cared for by auxiliary workers, who look after a few at a time.

Dong Wenying, 54, usually spends around an hour a day visiting her 81-year-old father-in-law, Gu Zhenping, a lung cancer patient who has been in the ward for three months.

"Our house is small and we don't have enough hands to care for my father-in-law," she said. "This hospice ward helps us a lot and relieves a lot of the burden on my family. Otherwise, we would have to send the old man to a hospital and then be forced to take him out of the hospital every two weeks, like we had to for the past four years.

"My father-in-law was rotated among four hospitals, which agreed to admit him after we begged. The fact is, no hospital in Shanghai is willing to accept terminal cancer patients."

Dong's family is among the few to have benefited from a municipal government project in which 18 community health centres were ordered to open hospice wards last year. Each centre has 10 beds, but that supply falls far short of demand.

Around 36,000 people die of cancer every year in Shanghai, but the city previously had almost no hospice beds. Public hospitals take no interest in those about to die, as there is no money to be made by treating them. So the last stop in most patients' lives is either an intensive care unit or an emergency ward.