Dr. Katherine I. Pettus, PhD, IAHPC Advocacy Officer for Palliative Care Medicines, reports on key advocacy meetings in September in Uganda, Budapest and Vienna.
“We are glad you came! Palliative care is something that you can easily forget,” an official told us cheerfully after a strategic planning meeting with the Uganda Ministry of Health on refugees. “You reminded us!”
The "you" in the above quote refers to our ad hoc delegation from IAHPC, the Palliative Care Association of Uganda (PCAU), Hospice Africa Uganda (HAU) and Global Partners in Care. We had been invited to their meeting by local colleagues from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and were able to ensure the ministry included palliative care line items in both the government strategic plan for refugee health, and in the budget. Uganda wants refugees to access the same public services (including education and health) as the host population, so we included the West Nile population, which has virtually no access, in the calculations.
The following day, Feed the Hungry staff led our delegation upcountry to the Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement where the Ugandan government has given tens of thousands of South Sudanese small plots to farm, and basic materials for constructing shelters. The Real Medicine Foundation physicians directing the camp clinic agreed to work with PCAU on a basic needs assessment to calculate the number of patients requiring palliative care. I also met Registered Nurse John Bosco from Adjumani, who is studying at the Institute for Hospice and Palliative Care in Africa so he can better serve the hundreds of critically ill patients in the West Nile region.
A highlight of the joint PCAU/UCI (Uganda Cancer Institute) conference in Kampala was a workshop convened by Open Society East Africa to address an oversight in the updated 2015 Narcotics Law that could result in the criminalization of palliative care nurses who prescribe and dispense morphine, and who have been doing so legally since 2004. The event was attended by representatives from Ministry of Health, Anti-Narcotics Control Officers, the national and regional palliative care associations, national human rights organizations, myself for IAHPC, and several journalists. A commission of key stakeholders formed to solve the problem, and the Narcotics Commissioner, a self-declared “convert” to palliative care, assured the audience that his officers would not arrest nurses (for trafficking!). It was a gratifying textbook example, as I told the group, of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS) Outcome Document recommendations for multi-sectoral, multi-stakeholder action to remove barriers to access to controlled medicines in action.
My Huffington Post blog post describes the ethos of African palliative care.
The IAHPC delegation to the 67th Session of the WHO Regional Committee for Europe consisted of Dr. Gábor Benyó and myself, with Dr. Julie Ling (Chief Executive Officer of European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC) attending for the World Hospice Palliative Care Alliance. (Read our recent post on the EAPC Blog).
On September 19 to 21, I attended an expert meeting convened by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime to draft a document for member states containing practical actions to implement the recommendations of the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS) Outcome Document on improving access to essential controlled medicines. Representatives of the International Narcotics Control Board, World Health Organization (WHO), China, Pakistan; non-governmental organizations from Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Greece, Malta, Mexico, and Poland, participated. Policy experts included Drs. Jim Cleary and Martha Maurer from the Pain and Policy Studies Group and Diederik Lohman from Human Rights Watch.
Next month I will report on the Intersessional discussions on controlled medicines at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the Academia Pro Vita meeting at the Vatican and the WHO Global Conference on Non-Communicable Diseases.
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