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Dangerously sick seniors often rejected as inpatients
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ALONG a corridor in a local hospital in Shanghai were placed an array of ambulance beds. Each bed was separated by two curtains on either side, leaving room in between as a temporary ward. Men and women, mostly the elderly, were languishing on these makeshift beds, waiting to be checked by any nurse on patrol.
Deep down the corridor, beside a bed labeled “Number +20,” Wang Lanfang leaned back on a folding chair, drowsy and drained. She had been by the side of the bed — where her husband was lying with a ventilator — for 24 hours every day without a break. Just a week into the hospital stay, on June 2, her husband, Zhao Zhongrong, died.
For over 30 days, this was the fifth hospital Lanfang had tried. After her husband’s health worsened in late November 2013 as a result of a malignant gall bladder tumor, she went to great lengths to have him admitted to any nearby hospital as an inpatient. Many other hospitals had rejected her request on the ground that the patient was too old and that his cancer was hard to cure.
Zhao Zhongrong, in his 80s, for years had been plagued with diseases of the heart, lungs and, recently, gall bladder, which in the past couple of months escalated to the most worrisome truth: He couldn’t eat much, and his body was lapsing into atrophy.
Zhongrong and Lanfang were my beloved grandparents. They had been married for almost 60 years.
Zhongrong’s case was far from unique. He was one of 150,000 cancer patients aged over 60 in Shanghai, a city where 1 percent of residents were diagnosed with cancer in 2013 by the Shanghai Disease Control & Prevention Center.
The three most common were breast cancer, bowel cancer and lung cancer, according to the report on Shanghai citizens’ health conditions.
However, apart from the striking cancer-ridden population, what’s at least as alarming is that medical resources fall far short of the need.
The lack of wards, curative treatment and nursing care for patients like Zhongrong in local hospitals is causing many to fail in their attempts to be admitted to hospitals as inpatients, let alone to receive proper medical care.
Better hospice needed
According to an investigative report on hospice service in Shanghai, published in the Journal of Shanghai Jiaotong University in August 2013, there were only three hospitals registered as hospice providers in Shanghai, alongside a small number of community health clinics providing only a few hospice special beds. There were also a minuscule number of hospice practitioners, accounting for 3.43 percent and 2.97 percent of the total doctors and nurses of two investigated hospitals.
Two years ago, Qin Ling, a Shanghai local, lost his father, Qin Jinpei, to lung cancer. He wrote in a letter to Yu Zhengsheng, the then Party Secretary of Shanghai, about what hospitals should do for patients at the terminal cancer stage. One guideline was to provide patients with a stable and safe environment so that they can keep their dignity.
The call was answered by a string of government actions. According to the Xinmin Evening News, a well-known local newspaper, 84 wards and 234 beds for palliative treatment existed in 17 districts of Shanghai up to the end of 2013. Another 1,000 beds were to be on the agenda of 2014 by the city government.
Yes, the local government has paid more and more attention to the lack of hospice service, but in the case of my grandfather, it was clear that there was still a long a way to go.
Let’s hope that all the elderly who are terminally ill will be well taken care of in the not-too-distant future.
The author is a reader from Shanghai.
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