A think tank on Tuesday called on the government to play a bigger role in supporting dying patients, saying more comprehensive end-of-life care services could also relieve pressure on the public health system.

Dicky Chow, a senior researcher at the Our Hong Kong Foundation, said while the government is introducing legislation that allows people to make decisions in advance regarding life-sustaining treatment, more needs to be done in other areas.

“The problem [with the Advance Decision on Life-sustaining Treatment Bill] is it only covers the medical part. So it only takes care of the medical needs of the end-of-life care patient, but the care needs are actually quite broad and comprehensive, like social, spiritual, and psychological,” he said.

“We think that we should extend beyond ‘Advanced Medical Directive’ to ‘Advanced Care Planning’ to cover all these comprehensive care needs.”

Chow said that such planning would mean a comprehensive communication process between patients and their family and doctors that could start years in advance.

“It extends the end-of-life care beyond just the last 12 months of your life,” he said.

He said while various NGOs and the Hospital Authority are now providing such services, there's no consistent standard, making it difficult for people to find and use them.

“We need to connect the services so that the end-of-life care patients do not need to navigate the system by themselves. They can be referred by a certain mechanism or certain agency, just like in Singapore, they have their agency for integrated care,” Chow said.

“So what the government needs to do is to integrate these models and talk to these NGOs, talk with the Hospital Authority and try to coordinate to make it standardised.”

Chow added that introducing comprehensive end-of-life care services in the community would hopefully reduce the number of people using hospital services.