Traveling Scholars Program Report
MKDL Meegoda, DR
Travel date: September 11, 2019
Name of Meeting/Event/Activity: Oceanic Palliative Care Conference 2019 (19OPCC)
Origin: Colombo, SriLanka / Destination: Perth, Australia
How was this meeting/activity helpful to you?
Updating knowledge and skills on palliative care is essential to provide and teach palliative care. As I am a university academic, I am always trying to update my knowledge and skills on palliative care. There were very interesting and eye-opening sessions and panel discussions in the conference. Poster presentations and oral presentations also were in good quality. Therefore, this conference was helpful to me to overcome my aim of updating.
How will you new knowledge & acquired skills help in furthering your work in hospice and palliative care in your program/city/ or country?
I am teaching to nursing undergraduates. All the palliative care lectures are done by me for the nursing undergraduates who are learning in my university. This updated knowledge and skills will help me do a change in teaching in the university. Also motivated me to do further research in the field of palliative care in different situations. Certain times I have to teach to the practicing nurses in main hospitals in Sri Lanka to enhance their practice on palliative care. Therefore, I can contribute to provide better care for the needy people in palliative care settings through the nurses. Furthermore, there are certain situations I have to attend with the palliative care consultative meetings in developing palliative care services in Sri Lanka. The updated knowledge and skills will help me to contribute with all of them fruitfully.
How IAHPC Traveling Scholars Program be improved in order to help other future traveling scholars?
Even now the IAHPC Travelling Scholarship is worth and very helpful especially to the nurses who are from poor income and middle-income countries. There are no adequate opportunities to update our knowledge and skills in our countries as we are still developing the palliative care services. Also, nurses from those countries are not in a position to spend that much expenses to attend conferences which are in foreign countries. As the amount is not adequate, its better if the amount of Scholarship is adequate for all the expenses of the attendee.
Narrative summary highlighting the needs and challanges you face
Listening to the sessions and panel discussions I realized that palliative care is well developed in Australia. All the other presentations were evident that palliative care is well established in most of the other countries. However, in Sri Lanka we are trying to establish a good palliative care service and having meetings to discuss about the development of palliative care service. Now we have started to do palliative care education for nurses at the undergraduate level at least as elective subjects. This updated knowledge and skills will help me do a change in teaching in the university. Also motivated me to do further research in the field of palliative care in different situations. Certain times I have to teach to the practicing nurses in main hospitals in Sri Lanka to enhance their practice on palliative care. Therefore, I can contribute to provide better care for the needy people in palliative care settings through the nurses. Furthermore, there are certain situations I have to attend with the palliative care consultative meetings to develop palliative care services in Sri Lanka. The updated knowledge and skills will help me to contribute with all of them fruitfully. We pay our gratitude for foreign academics who gave us palliative care education, but it was only for very limited nurses. Still we are having financial barriers as well to provide better care. With the experience gained from the conference, I feel that I can do some change among nurses who are in palliative care service.