Do young people living alone and empty-nest elderly pay for "emotional support"?
Accompanying patients to seek medical care is no longer just about running errands. The competence to provide emotional support will be regarded as a "mandatory standard" for accompanying medical service practitioners, which has been written into the national standard for the first time.
Recently, the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Standardization Administration of China have officially released the *Basic Requirements for Socialized Accompanying Medical Services* (hereinafter referred to as the "Accompanying Medical Service Requirements"), which will be officially implemented on November 1, 2026.
The standard defines socialized accompanying medical services as auxiliary medical activities, requiring accompanying personnel to have four core professional competencies: medical arrangement capability, coordination and communication capability, emotional support capability, and emergency response capability.
The explicit inclusion of "emotional support capability" in the national standard is relatively rare in professional requirement documents. Emotion is now embedded in value creation and labor services at an unprecedented depth.
In China, 1 in every 4 to 5 people is aged 60 or above. By the end of 2024, the number of people aged 60 and above across the country had exceeded 310 million. China has not only entered a deeply aging society, but also has nearly 100 million single people. These two groups of people have given rise to a number of emerging occupations, such as medical accompaniment specialists and elderly care workers.
The upcoming implementation of the national standard means that this industry, which absorbs new market demands and a large number of employed people, will evolve from market exploration to standardized development. Hundreds of millions of people seeking medical treatment will obtain more professional medical assistance, covering not only basic medical knowledge, but also emotional support and humanistic care.
As artificial intelligence (AI) reconstructs social relations, emotional labor and the emotional economy are gradually transforming from marginal, hidden costs to the core driving force of production and consumption.
No.1
"Emotional Support" Has Become an Essential Skill
Seeking a medical accompaniment specialist when going to hospital for medical treatment has become a common practice at least in large cities, which has also spawned the medical accompaniment occupation.
Zhang Ming (pseudonym), a 42-year-old tech industry practitioner, told *Caijing* that after entering middle age, he has elderly people to support and children to raise in his family. When he is too occupied with work to spare time, he "strongly needs" professional medical accompaniment specialists to accompany his family members to seek medical care.
When American sociologist Arlie Hochschild first put forward the concept of "emotional labor", it mostly referred to the "smile masking" and emotion management performed by positions such as flight attendants and customer service staff to meet professional requirements, which was usually squeezed, unpaid and invisible effort.
If emotional labor used to be a free bonus in the past, it is now directly positioned as a core commercial product, such as medical accompaniment specialists, companion AI and other related services.
Medical accompaniment specialists are required to have not only coordination and communication capabilities, but also the ability to bring emotional value to the accompanied people, which is equally important. The *Accompanying Medical Service Requirements* lists it as a "mandatory standard", putting forward emotional support requirements for medical accompaniment personnel including accompanying, listening, responding, and comforting.
"With the national standard in place, I can choose a medical accompaniment specialist with greater peace of mind," Zhang Ming said. Due to the inconsistent backgrounds and entry thresholds of medical accompaniment specialists on the market, entrusting such an important matter of taking family members to see a doctor to a stranger "requires both courage and luck". Zhang Ming has always worried that the person he finds may just be a temporary part-timer, and only with good luck can he meet a well-trained person with professional ethics.
The consultation procedures in large hospitals are extremely complicated. From appointment, number collection, triage, examination, medicine collection to payment, these procedures are often distributed on different floors, or even in different buildings. Patients who are seeking medical treatment not only have limited physical strength, but are also in a psychologically vulnerable period, which makes them extremely vulnerable to helplessness and anxiety. Medical accompaniment specialists are not just "errand-running tools", but also "psychological buffers".
For the "emotional support" in medical accompaniment, Zhang Ming believes that it can prevent the elderly from facing the complicated medical procedures alone, and make them feel cared for and comforted during the medical process. "Seeking a medical accompaniment specialist does not mean that the children are not filial, but a way to find temporary help. If the medical accompaniment personnel can provide some emotional support, both the patients and their family members will feel more reassured."
In first-tier and second-tier cities, medical resources are highly concentrated, cross-region medical treatment is common, coupled with the changes in family structure and the increasing work pressure, many children are unable to accompany their elderly parents to seek medical care, so hiring a medical accompaniment specialist has become a helpless yet convenient choice.
In early 2026, 47-year-old Wu Ying took two phases of training and started to take medical accompaniment orders. After accompanying an elderly couple to seek medical treatment, she told *Caijing* that she truly felt the pain and endurance of the elderly after getting sick, as well as the hidden guilt deep in their hearts: they felt guilty for not being able to help their children take care of the family even when they were ill. One of the children of this elderly couple is working hard for his career in Beijing, had children at a relatively late age and the kid is still very young, so he cannot accompany the elderly to seek medical care frequently, and has to place an order online to hire a medical accompaniment specialist. In the repeated communication and feedback before and after each medical consultation, Wu Ying also realized the difficulties of the elderly's children: "They are busy with their work, and have to take care of their own small family as well as the extended family. They have to take good care of the small family first before they can take care of the extended family, and the children are also in a very difficult position at this time."
Ren Zeming, the Beijing head of the platform Peiyi Wuyou, told *Caijing* that the work of a medical accompaniment specialist is not only acting as the patient's assistant and the doctor's interpreter, but also a "temporary family member".
In fact, it is not only the elderly who need medical accompaniment services. The *Accompanying Medical Service Requirements* points out that people who need medical accompaniment services also include those who have difficulties in seeking medical care due to mobility or cognitive impairments, patients who receive medical treatment across regions, and individuals pursuing a better medical experience.
Ren Zeming said that medical accompaniment specialists need to be careful and considerate, respond to the emotional needs of customers in a timely manner, provide emotional and psychological support for customers, and alleviate the sense of loneliness and anxiety when seeking medical treatment alone without family members around.
No.2
Has the Entry Threshold for Medical Accompaniment Been Raised?
When "emotional support" is written into the industry specification, the emotional labor paid by medical accompaniment personnel is no longer unpaid hidden consumption, which guarantees reasonable returns for practitioners from the institutional level, and also raises the entry threshold of the industry.
Ren Zeming believes that the upcoming implementation of the national standard for medical accompaniment is an important event for the entire industry, which will promote the more standardized development of the industry.
According to the requirements of the *Accompanying Medical Service Requirements*, service providers shall complete industrial and commercial registration in accordance with the law, service personnel shall complete pre-job training, and regular special on-the-job training shall be provided.
This means that medical accompaniment is no longer a behavior that anyone can do just by running errands. "This is actually the compliance requirement put forward by the national standard for service providers and practitioners," Ren Zeming analyzed. In the future, small workshop-style individual services will be impacted. Since the service targets of medical accompaniment are patients, which may easily lead to risks, it is necessary to improve the professionalization of the industry and implement strict management, so that the service targets can seek medical treatment with greater peace of mind.
A number of platforms, elderly care institutions and hospitals are exploring and innovating elderly care services, such as medical care workers different from traditional care workers, medical accompaniment specialists rooted in communities, etc., and are developing towards specialization. For example, some platforms have launched a "specialist medical accompaniment" training system, which divides complex medical scenarios into 35 specialist directions precisely.
Wu Ying used to work as a financial staff in a state-owned enterprise. In recent years, affected by market fluctuations, she returned to her family from the workplace. After seeing a public welfare skill training notice for medical accompaniment specialists released by the sub-district office, Wu Ying went to attend a trial lecture. Most of the people who participated in the training at the same time as Wu Ying were middle-aged women like her who were looking for new career paths, stay-at-home moms who returned to their families for various reasons, and there were also former employees of large internet companies among them.
The *Accompanying Medical Service Requirements* suggests establishing an information publicity mechanism for accompanying personnel, and it is also advisable to establish a system for classification, grading and order matching of accompanying personnel.
However, the *Accompanying Medical Service Requirements* does not specify specific charging standards, but requires service providers to publicize the charging standards through the service platform, and the actual charge shall conform to the published charging standards.
Some medical accompaniment specialists told *Caijing* that currently some people who engage in live streaming on social media, under the guise of being medical accompaniment specialists, are actually engaged in matters such as helping with registration and hospitalization procedures, doing things similar to "scalpers".
The information publicity mechanism for accompanying personnel will help reduce "counterfeit" behaviors. According to the *Accompanying Medical Service Requirements*, the public information of accompanying personnel includes the validity period of the health certificate, training records, years of service, cumulative number of services, as well as professional skills such as good at service scenarios, mastered special skills, past service evaluations, etc.
However, emotion is extremely subjective and varies from person to person. How to avoid turning empathy into a routine of "customer service-style smile" and maintain the authenticity of human touch should be the biggest difficulty in the implementation of this national standard.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Caijing Big Health", written by Wang Lina, edited by Wang Xiao, and published with authorization from 36Kr.