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IAHPC Palliative Care
Faculty Development Report
BENEFICIARY: MUHIMBILI UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF HEALTH SCIENCES
IMPLIMENTING AGENCY: OCEAN ROAD CANCER INSTITUTE
FELLOW; DR. MSEMO B. DIWANI
Follow-up Report Period: March-May, 2007
This report covers the continuation of the faculty program/work which was started in December, 2004. During the report period we offered the following courses as a response to the great need for palliative care knowledge and skills in our community:
1. Five days of intensive palliative care training for 32 clinicians and one pharmacist from Kinondoni municipal.
2. Training of 8 gynecology postgraduate students from the university in basic principles of palliative care.
These educational programs were the result of last year’s training of home based care providers conducted in the same community that focused on improving morphine use for good pain and symptoms control. At the time, our team established a
mentorship program so that we were able to visit and evaluate the successes and challenges of these home based providers. The most obvious difficulty we found was that they had to deal with their respective heads of health facilities that were not aware of the importance of palliative
care and were not cooperating with them. This made their work rather difficult as they were not in a position to make final decisions regarding important palliative care issues faced by their patients even though they knew how to deal with them. After discussing this with the INCTR,
they were able to provide us with some funds to carry out this training.
From a political perspective, I invited the then City Medical Officer, who is now the Director General of Medical Services from the Ministry of Health, to pass out certificates of completion to the participants at the end of the five days. I also invited the media to cover the event
so as to raise the palliative care awareness of members of health professionals and the general public at large. The event was well received and our guest promised to use his power to make morphine available and accessible to many people - he is indeed working with us on this.
With regard to the palliative care training of the students, it took place during the second week following a gynecologic oncology rotation at our Institute. The participants were able to appreciate the subject and wished more time could be spent with the palliative care team. This
response helps to cement our position within the faculty and I believe that, in time, we shall have sufficient opportunity to allocate palliative care in the curriculum.
Conclusion
The IAHPC faculty development program is performing fairly well both in the community and the medical school. We still have not achieved one of the aims of the project which is to conduct palliative care research, but plans are underway to address this challenge.
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