Volume 24, Number 5: May 2023

This shot by Lankoande Martin of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, won first place in IAHPC's first photo contest, in 2021.

IAHPC Launches the
2023 Photo Contest

IAHPC has launched its 2023 Photo Contest, a golden opportunity for you to show us what palliative care looks like in your part of the world. This is an opportunity for you to show us your world. Open to all IAHPC members, the deadline is October 31, 2023. 

The potential for reward is great. IAHPC is awarding three prizes that will reap winners both cash and membership extensions:

• 1st place: US $300 and a 2-year membership extension 
• 2nd place: US $200 and a 1-year membership extension 
• 3rd place: US $100 and a 6-month membership extension 

Don’t be shy about sending us your snaps—you are not competing against professionals! We want to see what you and your colleagues do in your daily work. 

You don’t need a camera: your smartphone takes great pictures, too.

Let photos reflect your experience in palliative care. The contest is a showcase of our members’ practices and experiences, inspiring and informing the global IAHPC community. Photos depicting patient care, advocacy, volunteering, caregiving, and participation in educational programs are all welcome.

Photos will be judged by an ad hoc committee of IAHPC staff and board members. All submissions will be anonymized; images will be judged solely on merit. 

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Now is a Terrific Time to Join/Renew the IAHPC membership!

IAHPC members have a lot to look forward to in 2023 as we continue to support palliative care workers in all fields, in all countries, in myriad ways.

We have recently reinstated a book benefit: thanks to Dr. Eduardo Bruera and the Department Palliative, Rehabilitation & Integrative Medicine, we have received a fresh selection of books on palliative care topics. New and renewing members can choose the books they wish, and only pay shipping costs from our head office in Texas. The titles are: The MD Anderson Supportive and Palliative Care Handbook 2018, 6th ed.; MD Anderson's Guide to Supportive and Palliative Care for Nurses, 2nd ed.; and Some Notes for Physicians Contemplating a Career in Palliative and Person-Centered Care, by Eduardo Bruera, MD.

Last year saw the rollout of courses that put expert, up-to-date information and advice into members' hands. The Comprehensive Pain Assessment and Management Course and Comprehensive Symptom Assessment and Management Course are available online to view at your convenience. They joined our popular Advocacy Course given by IAHPC Senior Director of Partnerships and Advocacy Katherine Pettus.

The same webinar format used for those courses, where an unlimited number of members can sign up to participate in each of the Zoom sessions, will be repeated for an updated and advanced course on symptom management. 

Currently "under construction" is a new feature for members, Ask Me Anything. Registered participants to these Zoom sessions—each one on a specific topic—can ask their burning questions of IAHPC Board Members and officers. 

Feel alone? Scroll down to our new Members Map. Click on any red marker to see the names of fellow individual members and institutional members in that country. 

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In Your Mailbox: An IAHPC appeal to share

Last week, the International Association of Hospice and Palliative Care sent an email blast asking for help to support its advocacy, one of the four pivotal pillars of IAHPC's work. This will be followed, in coming weeks, with appeals specific to the other three pillars: education, research, and communication.

It is a financial necessity: the association needs to raise $100,000 to keep it going through 2023-2024. Many donors have exited the field. But our work is clearly not done—not when just 14% of the world has access to palliative care.

While these emails ask for donations, as well as for new members, there is an important third element: making palliative care better known and understood. Which is why we also ask you to share these emails widely. 

When the public understands the purpose of palliative care, and sees its impact, more pressure to bring palliative care into every community can achieve the ultimate goal: banishing health-related suffering and living one's best life during difficult times.

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IAHPC Scholars for EAPC World Congress

Five IAHPC Scholarship recipients have been selected to attend the European Association for Palliative Care Congress taking place in Rotterdam, Netherlands, from June 15-17, 2023. They are:

• Miguel Bayona from Neiva, Colombia
• Diana Beglaryan from Yerevan, Armenia
• Farah Demachkieh from Beirut, Lebanon
• Lisa Christine Irumba from Kampala, Uganda
• Shantanu Sharma from Jaipur, India

The scholarship covers the registration fee as well as travel to the congress. We will publish the Scholars' conference reports in a future issue of the newsletter.

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Reader Recommended

Geriatrician and CUDECA member Dr. Rafael Gómez García recommends videos on Fundación CUDECA's YouTube channel, some of which have received awards at film festivals. There are more than 225 videos, with the earliest dating back nine years. Some are multiples of the same video, with translation (English and Spanish). The rich offering includes one video that demonstrates a composer gathering sounds from a hospice to create a musical composition of hospice care.

Dr. Gómez also gives a shout-out to Europe's The ILive Project (aka Live Well, Die Well), a four-year program with a global impact "to develop novel, evidence-based and sustainable interventions to relieve the symptoms and suffering that occur at end of life for patients with advanced chronic illnesses and their families."

Tidbits

Palliversations #3: Palliative care in rural India 

The most recent video in the Palliversations project by Akshaybhasha is a conversation about palliative care in rural India with Dr. Ashita Singh. We are told that people in remote communities accept death as part of life, and are comfortable talking about dying at home. However, "they are also willing to run from medical treatment," and may not access adequate care. Death "can be accepted too easily, when it could be prevented. You have to fight on their behalf."

Dr. Singh notes that decisions are not made by an individual, but are a consensus of many. In rural India, cancer is "rampant," mainly due to tobacco chewing. While technological advances and access to pain medicines may be scarce, their lack does not impede patients from palliative care. "We need loving, caring people—which we have. We just need to empower them with the tools of care." 

How To Do Media Interviews 

 In Talking to the Press about Palliative Care, a seven-minute YouTube video by the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), based in the United States, clinicians role-play interviews with a reporter to demonstrate how redirect a conversation using pivots (to divert onto another topic) and bridges (to draw the conversation into a preferred, related topic). The video is intended to give practitioners tools to “provide positive, more accurate information,” such as correcting the misconception that palliative care is only for those at the end of life.

"Palliative care is an often-misunderstood term," says the CAPC. "It is, therefore, critical that everyone talking about palliative care to the media is fully aware of how to define it and how to discuss it correctly."

Two MSF Jobs in Palliative Care

As part of the palliative care transformation project, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) seeks a nurse and public health specialist to help "integrate palliative care services in more structural and sustainable ways in all its projects to improve quality of death and dying." View a complete description of the nurse and the public health specialist jobs. The deadline to apply for both is May 21, 2023.

From the Front Lines in Khartoum

Former IAHPC board member Nahla Gafer is a clinical oncologist living and working in Khartoum, Sudan. In a blog for Cairdeas International Palliative Care Trust, she describes her and her family's experience living in open warfare. She is safe, at the time of publication, in northern Sudan. Gafer has been managing patients with her team over WhatsApp and, when possible, the telephone. She cared for three patients with neurological conditions and no resources at their homes. “Unfortunately, I lost two of them because they couldn't get the ICU care they needed. Thank God the third one is stable and well.” In the same space, below Dr. Gafer's submission, you can read a report by family physician and palliative care specialist at Khartoum Oncology Hospital, Dr. Mohja Khairallah, who also wrote about early effects of the deadly fight.

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What’s New in the Calendar

New listings

Access all items in the IAHPC Calendar of Events.

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