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To strengthen end-of-life care services in the community, The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust has approved a further HK$260 million donation to implement phase three of the Jockey Club End-of-Life Community Care Project (JCECC) from 2022 to 2025, adding up a total funding of around HK$520 million. Initiated and funded by the Club’s Charities Trust in 2016, JCECC aims to provide quality end-of-life care for elderly patients with terminal illnesses in the community through multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration between social and medical systems.

The launch ceremony for phase three of JCECC was successfully held on 8 July. Permanent Secretary for Labour and Welfare of the HKSAR Government Ms Alice Lau, the Club’s Executive Director, Charities and Community Mr Leong Cheung, and Acting Dean of Social Sciences from The University of Hong Kong Professor Paul Yip officiated at the event.

“The Club is glad to see that JCECC has yield higher positive impact during this critical moment of Hong Kong,” said Mr Cheung. “We hope that end-of-life care services could be regularised in the future to address community needs.”

The research team of JCECC has analysed the needs and reactions of the service users of the "Integrated Community End-of-life Support Team" (ICEST) in six distinct periods of the pandemic. As terminally ill patients spent more time at home, it was found that community-based end-of-life care services provided timely support to those in need and the stress levels of their family carers were reduced in the first four waves of the pandemic.

Amid the pandemic, JCECC’s service team has used telephone and online means to offer support instead of face-to-face contact. Not only did this change not affect services, but their effectiveness also registered an increase. A social return on investment analysis indicated that the output of the end-of-life care services during the pandemic was 6.73 times the resource input, while the figure before the epidemic was 3.33.

Over the past six years, the project has offered community-based end-of-life services for terminally ill patients at home or in elderly homes, provided training to enhance competence of health and social care professionals, frontline practitioners and volunteers, and organised public education activities to promote compassionate communities. This will continue in phase three.

As of December 2021, JCECC had served more than 3,200 terminally ill patients and 8,400 family carers, and trained more than 30,000 professionals and frontline practitioners, and 3,400 volunteers. More than 220,000 citizens have gained better understanding of end-of-life care through the project.

The third phase will also see ICEST services expanded to more districts to serve more terminally ill elderly patients and their families. To scale up residential care homes’ end-of-life care services in the territory, the number of elderly homes participating in JCECC will double from 48 in phase two to 96, accounting for about 60% of subvented or contract homes in Hong Kong.