Palliative Care simply refers to holistic care for terminally ill patients and their families,focusing on pain relief and symptom management.
This program started officially in 2004 with the support from Evangelical Lutheran church in America (ELCA), then in 2007, the new grant came from USAID under a project called CHAT project scaling up the services to more facilities and after the project phased out the scale up continued to more other facility from 13 to 23 hospitals and 4 lower health facilities providing Palliative care services.
The Palliative Care teams available in ELCT health facilities work very close to a number of home based care volunteers who are helping to connect different people in the community with Palliative Care teams. Through this network, the ELCT Palliative Care program sees more than 40,000 patients and their families yearly.
Achievement of this program.
- The program has succeeded to scale up the services to cover 23 among 24 hospitals and 4 among 148 lower health facilities.
- Easy the access and availability of morphine
- Involved in the Palliative Care National policy guideline development process and Organization of different advocacy forums for Palliative Care policy implementation.
- Involved in the capacity building of health providers
