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Dear Readers:
This month we have several important announcements:
First, we are glad to inform you that the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kerala, India, was selected as recipient of a grant for our IAHPC Faculty Development Program. The program supports faculty full time positions in developing countries by paying for their salary for a full year, and half of it for a second year, with the condition that the institution/hospital signs a four year contract with the faculty person. This award was made possible thanks to a joint effort between IAHPC and the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO). The NHPCO has provided IAHPC a grant to support this program at Amrita and to establish an ongoing relationship with IAHPC in the developing world. Many thanks to Mr. Stephen Connor PhD, from NHPCO for his interest and commitment to this project.
We are also proud to let you know that IAHPC has established a partnership with the Centre for Distance Learning at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre and the University of Calgary in Canada. We will support Doctors Debbie Norval, Marietta vd Berg, Mari Engelbrecht and Elizabeth Gwyther from South Africa in the Online Course Becoming an Effective Facilitator of Web-based Learning. We are excited that we are be able to support these extraordinary individuals in this important initiative and hope that it will serve as a tool for further development in web based palliative care training.
As we did last year, IAHPC will be participating in the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting in New Orleans, June 4-7. We have been assigned a booth in the Exhibition Area. Ana Restrepo, our manager of member services, and Liliana will spend time there, so stop by to say hello, ask questions about IAHPC, find out about our programs, and ways you can help the organization. As some of you may know, ASCO is the leading meeting for oncologists and each year almost 30,000 oncologists from around the world attend this meeting. Over the last years ASCO organizers have increasingly become interested in palliative and supportive care issues and this trend continues to grow, with more and more palliative care presentations taking place during each meeting. If you plan to be in New Orleans, please stop by our booth # 524. We look forward to seeing many of our members there.
We are very grateful for a US $50,000 grant from the US Cancer Pain Relief Committee to support an IAHPC proposal entitled, "IAHPC: Sustainability and Capacity Building Funds." This grant will help us continue our work and enable institutions; individuals and governments to change and/or adopt appropriate palliative care policies and programs in their countries and regions. As you know, we have kept our administrative and office costs to the minimum which enables IAHPC to transfer most of these funds to the communities and individuals who need it.
Our Clearing House program continues to expand. Many thanks to the individuals, hospices, organizations, libraries and universities who have sent donated journals and books. Please remember that we also take medical supplies, either new or in excellent condition. Special thanks to Doctor Roger Woodruff, member of our Board of Directors for his donation of many copies of his book Palliative Medicine (3rd ed), published by Oxford University Press and to Ms. Pamela Bennett, from Purdue Fund, for their continued donation of Pain, Oncology Nursing and Palliative Care Journals.
We have a new page in our website called Symptom Assessment and Research Tools at http://www.hospicecare.com/resources/pain-research.htm that we hope will be a helpful way to find palliative and pain assessment tools in a single place. We invite you to visit this page and if there are any tools not listed in it, let us know. We will be happy to upload them. Please remember that we list tools that are free and universally available.
Until next month,
Eduardo Bruera, MD
Chair, Board of Directors
Liliana De Lima, MHA
Executive Director
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