Traveling Scholars Program Report
Eric Nagaonlé Somé, DR
Travel date: October 6, 2021
Name of Meeting/Event/Activity: 17th World Congress of the European Association for Palliative Care
Origin: New York, New York, Burkina Faso / Destination: Vilvoorde, Belgium
How was this meeting/activity helpful to you?
I am new in palliative care and the EAPC has been the first palliative care event I ever attended. Therefore, everything was new for me and it was a tremendous learning opportunity. My main objective here was to network and get into professional relationship in which my team and myself could keep learning in our daily practice by being able to ask quickly for seniors insights when facing issues in our clinical management of PC patients. Another objective was to discuss about effective strategy to launch and sustain a PC unit in a context where one has only ideas and a few personnel with nothing else. I discussed on the junior forum table and was able to apply to the JF membership. I discussed also twice on the table of the International Observatory on End of Life Care (IOELC). All these fruitful conversations will be leveraged to move our newly and first Burkina Faso PC unit forward. Big thanks to IAHPC for making this experience possible!
How will you new knowledge & acquired skills help in furthering your work in hospice and palliative care in your program/city/ or country?
Our main challenges to strengthening our palliative care unit are the lack of training and funding. The small staff doing the work started providing palliative after an autodidact learning through readings and exchanges with foreign palliative care specialists (from Uganda, Italy) via a WhatsApp platform we set up with our external relationships working in palliative care. The PC unit is working with both the contributions of the PC patients themselves and the for-not-profit medical centre hosting the PC unit. In this congress, I learned through the tables of discussions how to effectively raise funds using high profile figures who experienced or not palliative care. I commit to elaborate a fundraising plan based on this concept and submit it to the Clinique du Bon Sauveur health centre’s administration for improvement and implementation. I obtained also addresses of different courses on palliative care including MOOC courses that will be helpful to build capacity within our team. Second, as a researcher with no experience in PC, joining the junior forum will speed up the implementation of my research ambitions and hopefully help set up a research network that will help address PC issues specific to African and low and middle income settings. Please provide your comments on how you think the IAHPC Scholars program can be improved
How IAHPC Traveling Scholars Program be improved in order to help other future traveling scholars?
The IAHPC Scholars program is already a great supportive initiative. I appreciated it a lot and once
again, I would like to thank the IAHPC Scholars program with a special thanks to Genevieve Napier.
It may be interesting to combine this scholars program with a mentorship program with the aim to
support the scholars to successfully implement the main decision or idea generated by their participation
at the event with the aim to improve their work.
Since most scientific meetings are now organized online and the scholarships are subsequently
cheaper, supporting a short (e.g. one week) visiting trip to a well-functioning PC unit in any southern or
northern country may be an important plus for the scholars.
Narrative summary highlighting the needs and challanges you face
Our main challenges to strengthening our palliative care unit are the lack of training and funding. In this
congress, I learned through the tables of discussions how to effectively raise funds using high profile
figures who experienced or not palliative care. I commit to elaborate a fundraising plan based on this
concept and submit it to the Clinique du Bon Sauveur health centre’s administration for improvement and
implementation. I obtained also addresses of different courses on palliative care including MOOC
courses that will be helpful to build capacity within our team.
Second, as a researcher with no experience in PC, joining the junior forum will speed up the
implementation of my research ambitions and hopefully help set up a research network that will help
address PC issues specific to African and low and middle income settings.