Tseung Kwan O care centre brings love and care to terminally ill patients

Looking for a meaningful way to spend your Lunar New Year lai see packet? You could help terminally ill patients live with dignity and peace in their final days.

Cheng Kin-tai smiles with joy as she tells of how she knitted a scarf for her doctor in just two days. Cheng, 78, has terminal lung cancer. To her, love and care matters most, and that is what she is receiving at the Haven of Hope Sister Annie Skau Holistic Care Centre in Tseung Kwan O.

She is able to afford the specialised, palliative care offered by the centre only because the bed is available at one-third of the usual cost. Most patients pay at least HK$350 per day at the centre, which is run on a self-financing basis by a Christian organisation.

Under a separate scheme, the Relief and Charity Service Bed Fund, the centre also offers eight of its 124 beds for free. The subsidy schemes were introduced in 2012, six years after the centre opened, with the support of the private Baptist Hospital in Kowloon Tong and its CEO, Dr Raymond Chen Chung-i. Each free bed costs about HK$600,000 per year to provide and some 80 patients have benefited so far. Five other groups and two individuals also help the bed fund, and the centre aims to expand the number of free beds to 12 by next year.

"It is a pity that we are not subsidised by the government, therefore the poorest cannot afford our services," said Dr Antony Leung Chi-tat, medical superintendent of the centre.

Leung says end-of-life care is becoming more important as the city's population ages. Some 32 per cent of the 43,397 Hongkongers who died in 2013 had cancer, and would have required palliative care - making a patient as comfortable as possible.