'A place of healing': comfort for young cancer patients amid Sri Lanka's economic crisis.

Despite a combined economic crisis and drug shortage, Sri Lanka is poised to open its first children's palliative care centre - and also hopes to vastly improve the country's poor survival rates for child cancer.

The centre will offer end-of-life care as well as a place to stay for families who have to travel long distances to the country's only paediatric oncology ward in the capital, Colombo.

The new centre is called Suwa Arana (place of healing) and is due to open in June amid a national strategy to more than double Sri Lanka's survival rates for children with cancer to 60 percent, as part of a World Health Organization global initiative.

Eight-year-old Lochana Lahiru Athauda is one of the children set to benefit from Suwa Arana. He was two when he became one of the 828 Sri Lankan children diagnosed with cancer each year. In the six years...