Oct 11 marks World Hospice and Palliative Care Day. The previous day, Zhang Shuyan said goodbye to a cancer patient whom she had taken great care of for the past 16 months.

Zhang is a hospice care volunteer from Jilin University's Norman Bethune volunteers association. Losing her own parents 19 years ago, Zhang has given care to more than 30 cancer patients in their terminal stages. 　

"I hope I can help more people finish their life journey in peace, without regret," Zhang said.

Zhang's own tragedy and rebirth

Zhang's parents died in a car accident in 1995, leaving her an orphan at the age of seven. As time passed, Zhang got over her bereavement grief, thanks to help from Jilin University's volunteers, who held extracurricular tutoring for orphans and took them to visit the university. As a result, Zhang developed the idea of becoming a volunteer herself. In 2012, her dream came true.

Zhang studied sociology in her master's program, but she was immediately drawn to the work at the hospice when she took an internship at the First Hospital of Jilin University.

"I can't be where I am today without help from my country," Zhang said. "I didn't have the chance to take care of my parents, so now I want to treat every terminally ill patient as my own family."

Valuable work

Hospice care refers to positive and comprehensive medical care to patients without hope of a full recovery. It needs to control pain and other symptoms and solve mental and psychological problems to improve the patient's life quality.

At present, Zhang will spend more than half a day every week to work with medical personnel in hospice care volunteering work. She offers pain alleviation, symptom control, comfortable nursing, psychological solace and grief counseling.

Because patients receiving hospice care are usually old people and tormented with disease, most of them give volunteers the cold shoulder, thinking that they don't understand their pain. In the face of the patients’ misunderstanding, hospice care volunteers don’t give up.

Zhang has delivered drugs to her patients on time every week. Some volunteers even learned massage skills on their own and offered a 40-minute massage session to patients to help them ease the pain.

"In addition to helping patients relieve the pain, more importantly, we have to help them have emotional communications with their family to reduce the fear towards the unknown and death and achieve holistic care," said Zhang.

Hospice care volunteers also have their own work ethics. Zhang said that they are forbidden to offer drug prescriptions to patients and invest emotion on the relationship to the extent that they can't pull back.

It's also not advisable to offer patients financial support,"because volunteers may quit because they can't afford the financial assistance, which, in turn, works against the hospice care work," she explained.

Healthy lifestyle

Although volunteers can help patients to better understand nature, and to rebuild dying patients' understanding and interpretation of life’s meaning, Zhang hoped that there could be as little demand for hospice care volunteers as possible.

"I hope everyone can develop a healthy lifestyle, and doesn't overspend their health. One can only understand the importance of the moment after experiencing life and death.

Although Zhang will not work in a hospice, she said that she would continue the volunteer work and carry forward the volunteering spirit of devotion, love, mutual assistance and advancement.

Background:

Starting in the 1970s, the idea of hospice care started to spread all over the world in various forms, such as soothing medicine, palliative and hospice care. It began in China's Tianjin, Shantou, Shanghai and Beijing in the 1980s. There are now more than 600 medical sites across the country for treating and taking care of seriously ill patients.