Butterfly Children’s Hospices (BCH) was founded by UK couple, Lynda and Alan Gould, with the ambition of alleviating the suffering of life-threatened children and their families in China through the introduction of children’s palliative care services. Working in co-operation with the Chinese government and healthcare organisations, they developed models of loving palliative care and treatment that suit the local situation and values culture.
Before moving to make their home in China in 2006, Alan and Lyn spent twelve years volunteering for short-term projects in Chinese orphanages giving them first-hand experience of the circumstances faced by sick and dying children, and the heartache of their families. These children desperately needed loving palliative care to transform their experience from suffering and despair to comfort and joy, however short their lives.
By starting with children who had been orphaned or abandoned, direct care could be provided to meet these children’s needs, while demonstrating the benefits of simple palliative care and developing a model that could be rolled out more widely, ultimately reaching families to support them and prevent the need to abandon their child as they had no other hope.
In 2010, Alan and Lyn established the Butterfly Home in Changsha to provide loving care and treatment for 214 very sick abandoned babies and children. Since then BCH has gone from strength to strength and achieved incredible things including, opening a second Butterfly Home in Nanjing, hosting four national children’s palliative care conferences, training Chinese nurses in children’s palliative care and opening the Butterfly wing for fragile children in the orphanage.
BCH has become a beacon for children’s palliative care in China, advocating, inspiring and training excellence in holistic, children’s palliative care services.
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