Dr James Jap helps dying people 'feel comfortable enough to be themselves'

As a shy person, James Jap was unsure about being filmed doing his job for the new ThreeNow reality show Hospice Heroes.

The opportunity to help tackle the "fear factor" many New Zealanders have around the word 'hospice' was part of what sold him.

"If being on the show opens people's eyes up, if it makes people less scared of hospice, if it means that we can help people earlier, that's what it's all about," he tells Sunday Morning.

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People assume working in a hospice is depressing, Jap says, but he finds it rewarding helping to control symptoms so "the real light of the person can shine through" in their final weeks or days.

While palliative care is for the dying, it's more about trying to improve the quality of life that a patient has left, he says, especially helping them feel "comfortable enough to be themselves" at the hospice.

"If I can do something with my skills to make them feel comfortable enough that the real person comes out again, that's what it's all about for me."

When a new patient arrives at Tōtara Hospice, Jap tells them that he is not the "driver" of their experience there, but more like the "GPS system" trying to make whatever is left of their journey as smooth as possible.

One day recently, that meant procuring a certain bourbon-infused RTD from his local bottle shop for a woman having trouble breathing at the end of her life.

"That look on her face when she had the first sip, the look of satisfaction... This was a familiar feeling, a familiar flavour. I should say it was a little slice of normality."

Jap, who has a side gig as Tōtara Hospice's Chief Fly Catcher, managed to share a good laugh with another patient who happened to have "a really big tummy".

"One of her granddaughters said, when I was listening to a tummy, 'Can you hear a heartbeat?'

"I said, 'I can hear three heartbeats. It's going to be triplets. Congratulations!'.

"Everybody was laughing, and we just kept that joke going on, me and the lady. Even at the end of your life, you want to be yourself. You want to be your funny old self."

Death is the inevitable final part of all our lives but we live in a death-denying society, Jap says.

He fears New Zealanders will be in danger of more suffering if our hospices are forced to cut back on services due to a lack of funding.

Tōtara Hospice, which has 420 to 480 patients on their books, gets around half of its operational funding from Health NZ, Jap says, but couldn't stay afloat without revenue generated by hospice op shops and fundraising.

"We've been here for 43 years. We fully intend to be here for the next 43 years because our community needs us. That need is going to increase, if anything. So we really have to fight for funding. We need to change the situation."