By Julia Downing | Project leader
To all our supporters and friends, thank you so much for your continued support and we are delighted to share with you updates from the team on what have been able to achieve in the last three months since we last shared with you.
1. Patient care
Our economy is our now fully open and business is back to normal with all sectors fully functioning whilst observing the COVID-19 control and prevention guidelines and measures including social distancing, sanitizing our hands and wearing masks. Our patients are now able to come to the hospital although transport is still a challenge as transport fares to move from one place to another are still high.
With your support, in this period the team has been able to able to care for 246 patients and their families in Mulago and Kiruddu hospitals with 924 physical reviews and 434 phone contacts to identified patients and their families. This relates not only to clincial care in the hospital but also any contacts that relate to patient care including; follow up on symptom management, referrals to community based care for continuity, consultations between the multidisciplinary team.
With your financial support, the team is able to buy the masks and sanitizers that are needed for their own protection while caring for the patients.
Below we share with you some reflections from our patient care service.
How Salima’s Life Story was transformed by palliative care;
As told by Toko our Social work coordinator
‘’ Look at me now. Iam healthy, I can smile, breath, and talk, I really look youthful for a 23-year-old. Would you be able to tell that I am HIV positive? It is a surreal experience for her that she is still alive now, especially when her mind flashes back to March 2022.
“I was bed ridden all the time, suffering with difficulties in breathing as a result of contracting tuberculosis and had to depend on oxygen most of the time. I had of course seen my relatives and friends die of AIDS, and honestly, the symptoms I had were quite familiar but I always blocked the idea that I could be HIV positive out of my mind but I had to face the reality. I should have been wiser and careful”, she recalls with teary eyes.
She continues to say… “I grew weaker and weaker, thinner and thinner by the day that I could no longer support myself, all my clothes fitted me no more. The disease was biting at me with vengeance. I was surely dying to my relatives and friends who had abandoned me, it was a matter of time and I would be dead”
While abandoned at the hospital, this great team found me - to me they were strangers but now they are my family and friends.
“I am so grateful to the palliative care team and the volunteers for the support they gave me! They listen to people and give time to us to express our emotions and feelings. They counselled, educated and empowered me and put a smile on my face."
2. Education & Training
Training of undergraduate medical students and postgraduate students
In the last 3 months, we have trained 73 undergraduate medical students from Makerere University; 2 Family medicine physicians, 11 undergraduate medical students from the Islamic University in Uganda, 2 masters’ students in PC from the Institute of Hospice and Palliative care as well as 11 initiators from 7 Francfone African countries.
We share with you some of their learning below;
Ongoing online learning and discussions:
COVID-19 introduced us to a new norm of online meetings and gatherings and these has become part of our lives and its with your support that the team is able to get the internet connection to enable them attend these meetings. In this period, we have attended a number of online discussions that included; The Palliative Care Association of Uganda virtual update meetings, journal clubs and expert lectures of the PC fellowship that is being run by PcERC supported by CairdeasIPCT.
3. Research and research related activities
We have presented at the following conferences;
IAPCON conference presentation. The team attended and participated in the Indian Association of Palliative Care Conference which took place 11th-13th February 2022, during which our main partners CairdeasIPCT with its partners; Mehac Foundation, PallCHASE and Global Health Academy of University of Edinburgh hosted a pre-conference workshop on Palliative care and planetary health in humanitarian settings, at this workshop we presented a paper on “Ensuring community generated data – Uganda by Dr.Mhoira Leng and Chris Smith, a piece of work from our Transform project. We were also involved with our partner ICPCN in a pre-conference workshop on children's palliative care.
The African Palliative Care Conference will be held 24-26 August 2022; Kampala, Uganda with the theme: Palliative Care in a pandemic. The team have submitted four abstracts to this conference and if accepted, we will be delighted to present our work.
Research project: Exploring the Needs and lived experiences of people with chronic disease among the refugee and host communities of Obongi district and the experiences of Village Health Teams workers in providing PC in Obongi and Adjumani districts project. We received final ethics approval, data collection started in January and is ongoing alongside other mentorship and supervision activities and is expected to complete by June 2022. This project is funded by UKaid- From the British people.
Thank you so much for taking time to read our updates, we share these updates regularly and for more information about our work please free to contact us on; info.pcerc@gmail.com
Your continued support is much valued, God bless you all
PcERC team
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
