Hospices provide care at a critical time

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

Aaron Douglas' card on the hospice room pin-board says he hopes his Dad is feeling better - and that he enjoys the sweets.

Tony Douglas did not get to eat the sweets. His 8-year-old son could not resist scoffing the gift he had brought to cheer his father, who has cancer.

Mr Douglas, the 45-year-old managing director of insurer Axa Health, has an inoperable tumour on his spine and an uncertain future.

The growth has immobilised his arms and legs, and his doctors do not know whether he has months or years to live.

Mr Douglas has been a patient at the North Shore Hospice in Auckland, near the public hospital in Takapuna, for nearly a fortnight.

Today is National Hospice Day.

Hospices care for people in the last days of their lives, but Mr Douglas points out that their staff also provide longer-term support to patients and their families at home through community nursing assistance and counselling.

He hopes to return to his wife and three children at their Mairangi Bay home next week. The hospice staff had been helping them become "comfortable with their ability" to look after him, Mr Douglas said.

"There's nothing like home, but the hospice is a good halfway house - very caring and very understanding in terms of your needs."

Patients do not have to pay for the services of the hospice, which is run by a charitable trust and looks after 500 patients, mostly in the community.

Half its $2.1 million annual running costs are paid by the Government. The hospice must raise the rest itself, hence a public appeal this week aimed at bringing in $100,000.

Chief executive Peter Buckland said the North Shore's growth, plus its ageing population, was increasing the pressure on the hospice's services. Doubling the size of the nine-bed facility was being investigated.

The Government raised its spending this financial year on palliative care - therapy designed to relieve symptoms but not cure a condition - to $22 million, from $13.5 million.

Mr Buckland said the country's 37 hospices were receiving at least $14 million from the Government this year.