Former academic Dr Ng Kwai-lun offers Hongkongers transparent funeral, end-of-life planning

‘It’s your funeral’ is the message behind the work of former academic Dr Ng Kwai-lun, who is offering Hongkongers more choices in funeral care and end-of-life planning through his social enterprise.

Dr Ng Kwai-lun, a Spirit of Hong Kong Awards finalist, provides transparent funeral care and end-of-life planning for people in Hong Kong. His work grew out of years spent teaching Hongkongers about death and the arrangements involved at the end of life.

During that time, Dr Ng noticed a gap between what people were told they could do and the services that were actually available to them. The information and choices discussed with people did not always match the services they could access in practice.

That experience led him to try to bridge the gap. To do so, Dr Ng left a stable university career and became an entrepreneur. His move took him from an academic role into the work of providing funeral services and end-of-life planning through a social enterprise.

Before making that change, Dr Ng had worked at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s medical school. There, he managed embalming and also helped run and promote the university’s body donation initiative.

His earlier work gave him experience in both embalming and body donation. It also kept him closely connected to the practical arrangements surrounding death, as well as to the way those arrangements were explained to people.

While teaching Hongkongers about death and end-of-life arrangements, he was able to see the difference between available information and the services people could actually receive. That difference became an important part of his decision to leave university work and develop another way of helping people make arrangements.

By 2020, the pandemic had exposed another problem. The source material does not specify the nature of that problem, but it added to the concerns Dr Ng had already identified about the gap between what people were told and what was available to them.

His social enterprise is an attempt to respond to that gap. Through it, he offers transparent funeral care and end-of-life planning, giving Hongkongers more options when they have to deal with decisions connected to death and the final stage of life.

The work brings together the experience he gained at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s medical school and the lessons he learned while teaching. His responsibilities in embalming and the body donation initiative gave him practical experience, while his years of teaching showed him how people understood, and sometimes struggled with, end-of-life arrangements.

Dr Ng’s journey therefore moved from teaching and university work to entrepreneurship. The focus remained on death and end-of-life arrangements, but his role changed from explaining the available choices to creating a social enterprise aimed at making funeral care and end-of-life planning more transparent.

For Hongkongers, his work is presented as a way to have more choices and clearer arrangements at a time when people may need to make decisions about funeral care and the end of life.