By Julia Downing | Project Leader
Happy New Year greetings to all our supporters and friends!
We hope that you all had lovely Christmas holidays and that God has continued to keep you and your families safe!
To those who have lost our dear ones to the Covid-19 pandemic we grieve with you and may God give us all the comfort and strength that we need!
Just like in many other countries, the Covid-19 situation is now alarming in Uganda, with many new cases each day and more deaths, and our hospitals are now full!
But amidst all this you have enabled us to reach those in need and to continue our work. Thank you very much.
We are happy to bring you some updates of what have been able to do in the past few weeks.
1.Patient care
In the period (Sept-Dec 2020 the team has cared for a total of 214 patients and their families (including 4 patients with COVID-19 in the ICU) with 506 physical contacts to those in hospital while 280 were through telephone contact, mainly for follow up after discharge, bereavement support and continuity of care in the community.
MG is one of the patients that we have cared for and one of our volunteers (Vicky) updates us on the difference that the palliative care team made to his life.
MG was a 35-year-old male diagnosed with oral angiosarcoma and was admitted to the private wing of the Uganda Cancer Institute. He was referred to the Palliative care team for pain and other symptom management and thereafter a discussion on his treatment plan was carried piy by the specialist clinical team. The volunteers team offered practical support such as picking the oral morphine from the pharmacy to control the pain and availing him with the Cancer information booklet. The volunteers continued to visit him occasionally and listened to his worries and concerns. One of his major worries was, being neglected by the family, who were not willing to support him financially.
MG was so distressed by the lack of care and support from his family including his wife who spent most of the time on her business, which made him feel abandoned at a time when he needed her most and this made him cry all the time and affected him emotionally.
The volunteers continued to visit him regularly, counselled him were able reach out to his wife and other family members during a family conference and everyone had the opportunity to express their distresses, and also bridge the information gap that existed. MG was very grateful for the care given to him by the palliative care specialist team and volunteers and had this to say; “thank you for becoming part of my family and being good mediators. I know I may not have long to live, but I am happy, now that I have been able to reconcile with my loved ones, and wherever I go, I will rest in peace. I am sorry I can’t afford to pay you for your valuable time, but I pray that you continue reaching out to many that have untold and silent pains which may not be managed by the medicines written by other doctor.
2. Education & Training
We have supported the development and delivery of a training course for our partners Cairdeas IPCT & Peace Hospice Adjumani. The training focused on “Providing pre-exposure and ongoing psychosocial support and prevention of transmission of COVID-19 disease to Palliative health care workers providing care for COVID-19 patients in Adjumani hospital and Peace Hospice Adjumani so as to protect their physical and mental wellbeing. 47 health care workers participated in the online training with ongoing mentorship and supervision from Peace Hospice Adjumani, the training was funded by a small grant from the Tropical Health Education Trust (THET) through the Health Workers Action Fund.
We have also hosted a group of 8 Palliative care nursing students from the Mulago Nursing school for 2 weeks clinical placement from 2nd - 13th November 2020 to learn more about the practical aspects of palliative care.
On the 26th November we conducted the end of semester exams for the 5th Year Medical students of Makerere University, we had 60 students in total taking the palliative care module.
3. Research and conferences
We were honoured to be part of THET Annual conference 2020 that took place virtually on 1st,2nd 5th& 6thOctober 2020. We were represented by members of the team including; Toko, Josephine, Florence, Liz, Prof. Julia and Dr. Mhoira who also gave a presentation on “quality improvement in Palliative care”.
We thank our partners Cairdeas IPCT and ICPCN who supported our team to be able to attend this event.
We were also delighted to participate in the 11th European Association of Palliative Care (EAPC) World Research Congress 2020; 7th-8th October 2020, we were represented Dr.Liz, Liz, Grace, Prof. Julia and Dr. Mhoira. The conference was innovatively conducted online with very knowledgeable speakers, good quality research and lots of learning for the team. We again thank other our partners Cairdeas IPCT, ICPCN and the scholarships from IAHPC that enabled the team to attend this conference.
On Tuesday 17th November, we were able to share some of our work with Vicky and Peace Hospice at the virtual Global Power of Oncology Nursing conference.
4. Online learning and discussions:
In this period, we have attended a number of online discussions that included;
Thank you so much for taking time to read our updates, we will be sharing regularly and for more information about our work please free to contact us on; info.pcerc@gmail.com
God bless you all #stay safe as we look forward to what the New Year brings!
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