Message from the Chair
&
Executive Director
Kathleen M. Foley, MD (USA)
Liliana De Lima, MHA (USA)
Dear Readers:
As many of you know, we recently worked in collaboration with several organizations to develop the IAHPC list of Essential Medicines for Palliative Care. This list will be published in several journals and newsletters and we are also pleased to announce that it is now available in our website under the Treatment Guidelines in the Resources Section in http://www.hospicecare.com/resources/treatment.htm Look for IAHPC Essential List of Medicines in Palliative Care.
As we mentioned in a previous press release, this list was developed in response to a request of the Cancer Control Program of the World Health Organization (WHO) and is not based on evidence, but rather on the consensus of pain and palliative care experts from around the world. We hope that this list will serve as a flexible guide to help improve access to better palliative care. We encourage individuals and programs from around the world to use this list and tailor it to the needs of their own patient populations and modify it accordingly.
The European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC) recently announced that its Task Force on the Development of Palliative Care in Europe has completed reports from 42 different countries. The Task Force members, and its head, Dr. Carlos Centeno Cortes, hope that this will serve as a tool to monitor progress in the region and hopefully motivate others to develop and implement programs. The country reports are available in the EAPC website in http://www.eapcnet.org/Policy/CountriesReport.htm
We are pleased to announce that this month we have awarded two IAHPC Traveling Scholarships to:
- Dr Anjum S Khan Joad, of the Pain and Palliative Medicine program at Bhagwan Mahaveer Cancer Hospital and Research Centre in Jaipur , India , to travel to the National Cancer Center in Singapore to complete her second session of the international intensive course, graduate certificate in palliative care, given by Flinders University .
- Dr. Msemo Diwani, from the Palliative Care Program at Ocean Road Cancer Institute, in Daar es Salam, Tanzania, to travel to Cape Town in South Africa in order to complete his third session of the Palliative Care diploma.
We are glad that we are able to support these extraordinary leaders and hope that the knowledge gained during their travels will result in long lasting changes that will improve palliative care provision in their countries. We also look forward to their reports after their return.
To learn more about this program, go to the Traveling Scholarship
Program page in our website in www.hospicecare.com/Travellscholars/
The second World Hospice and Palliative Care Day 2006 was October 7th .
The event, sponsored by Help the Hospices in the UK and several international, regional and national organizations highlighted the need for people with terminal, or life limiting illnesses to have greater access to the care they need. Thousands of people around the world staged events on or around October 7th to raise awareness and fundraise for hospice and palliative care services locally, nationally and internationally to mark this annual global event. We hope that all our colleagues around the world who organized events were successful in their celebrations. More information about the WHPCD and the events which took place around the world can be seen in the official website at www.worldday.org
Professor David Currow, one of our Board members, and Meg Hegarty from the Department of Palliative and Supportive Services Flinders University in Australia , are writing a chapter on postgraduate education in palliative medicine for the forthcoming edition of The Oxford Textbook of Palliative Medicine. They would like to include information about programs being offered around the world. For the purpose of the chapter, they have defined "palliative medicine" broadly to include all palliative care professionals and "postgraduate education" as encompassing formal and informal education following basic training. IAHPC is helping them in the task of collecting information.
If you know, or are involved in, any such post graduate program, we invite you to submit the relevant information by completing a brief questionnaire.
To access the questionnaire please click here (New window will open)
With last month’s review of the excellent book by Reverend Michael Wright from the International Observatory in End of Life Care about Victor Zorza’s life (Victor Zorza: A Life Amid Loss), some readers have expressed interest in reading the book that Victor and Rosemary Zorza wrote about the death of their daughter Jane in Sir Michael Sobell House in
the UK. The book is out of print, but it is available online at
http://www.zorza.net/resources/waytodie/
Until next month,
Kathy Foley, MD
Chair, Board of Directors
Liliana De Lima, MHA
Executive Director
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