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Message from the Chair
and Executive Director
Roberto Wenk, MD (Argentina)
Liliana De Lima, MHA (USA)
Dear readers:
Welcome to our last issue of this year's Newsletter.
By the end of this year, six of our Board members will be completing their terms. They are Mohammed Al-Shahri (Saudi Arabia), Elizabeth Gwyther (South Africa), Ednin Hamzah (Malaysia), Margaret O’Connor (Australia), MR Rajagopal (India), and Carla Ripamonti (Italy). Please join us in thanking each of them for their contributions to IAHPC and their efforts in helping the organization achieve its mission. It has been an honor for us to have worked with these members of the Board.
As many of you know, we had an open call for members to nominate candidates to these positions. We received several nominations of excellent candidates and the board has recently voted. New directors will be announced later this month.
For many of you, this time of the year also means the end of your membership. Please remember to renew your membership so that you may continue helping us help others. Applications for new memberships or renewals can be found in http://www.hospicecare.com/join.htm
As this year ends, we are proud of the things we were able to achieve through our programs and projects and of the support we were able to provide to developing countries in the accomplishment of our mission. Some highlights of the programs and things we accomplished during 2008 are:
• IAHPC’s Traveling Fellowship Program: We provided grants to individuals who spent time teaching palliative care in Uganda, Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo and Ghana.
• IAHPC’s Traveling Scholarship Program: We paid the travel of palliative care leaders from Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Malawi, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Uruguay and Vietnam, to attend seminars, congresses and training courses.
• IAHPC’s Faculty Development Program: We are happy to announce that the grant for Sichuan University has been reinstated after some administrative difficulties were solved. Current grants under this program support palliative care faculty positions in Tanzania, China and Chile. The grant for Ocean Road Cancer Institute in Tanzania will end this year – IAHPC is proud to have been able to support Dr. Msemo Diwani in this position and we look forward to their final report.
• IAHPC’s Website at www.hospicecare.com has thousands of pages of information which are constantly updated by our Webmaster Anne Laidlaw and her team at Alou Web Design. All the pages are free and are accessed by readers every day from all corners of the globe. Several sections in the website are very popular and register many visitors per day, including the Bookshop that contains book reviews by Dr. Roger Woodruff, one of our board members.
• IAHPC’s Newsletter continues to provide updated information about new developments, events and progress reports from programs and individuals from around the world. We are very grateful with Dr. William Farr, the editor of our NL, for his voluntary work in editing and putting together this NL that reaches more than 9,000 subscribers around the world each month.
In addition to our regular programs mentioned above, this year we were able to collaborate with other organizations in several ways:
• We partially supported several palliative care congresses and meetings with sessions, co-funding and organizational endorsement: The 4th Congress of the Latin American Association for Palliative Care (ALCP) in Peru; the International Union Against Cancer (UICC)World Cancer Congress and its Global Cancer Declaration in Geneva; the 10th World Congress of the International Psycho-Oncology Society (IPOS) in Madrid; the 14th World AIDS Conference in Mexico and the 15th International Palliative Care Congress in Canada.
• In conjunction with the Worldwide Palliative Care Alliance (WPCA), we developed the Joint Declaration for the recognition of palliative care and pain treatment as Human Rights. To date, more than 4,000 individuals and more than 500 organizations have signed the Declaration. If you haven’t done so yet, you can read more and sign the Joint Declaration in http://www.hospicecare.com/resources/pain_pallcare_hr/
• IAHPC signed a collaborative agreement with the Sociedad Española de Cuidados Paliativos (SECPAL) to support the development of palliative care in Latin America with grants in nursing, medicine and administration.
• IAHPC has been a member of the European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC) Task Force on the Development of Palliative Care in Europe under the leadership of Dr. Carlos Centeno from Spain. IAHPC will continue collaborating with this task force which has been extremely active and has published several reports as well as the EAPC Atlas on the development and availability of palliative care services in the region.
In addition, IAHPC has collaborated with organizations, institutions and universities in collecting information for studies and reports for several publications on education, research, and care of patients around the world.
We could not have been able to achieve the above without the generous support of our board of directors, our members, donors, companies, foundations and organizations which believe in IAHPC’s mission and in our ability to have an impact on the promotion and development of palliative care. Our ability to continue to help others depends heavily on the support we receive from all of you, so please consider donating to IAHPC. You can donate through our website at https://www.hospicecare.com/give/donate.html
We face many challenges in the near future especially considering the current global economic situation. We are aware that we face financial constraints and have prepared ourselves to meet these challenges. Our strong commitment to supporting the development of palliative care around the world will continue to be our driving force. We wish to thank all those who make our work worthwhile - the patients and their families, the health care workers, and the volunteers who dedicate and give so much to palliative care.
Best wishes to all of you, your friends and family members for the coming holidays and hope that next year will be a happy and successful one.
Regards,
Roberto Wenk, MD
Chair, Board of Directors
Liliana De Lima, MHA
Executive Director
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