Dr Clint Cupido is a trailblazer in the palliative care community in South Africa. In an interview with Dr Clint Cupido, director of Abundant Life, a palliative care programme at Victoria Hospital in Wynberg, published by BizCommunity, he explains how patients living with serious illnesses and their loved ones are supported through their programme. It is one of the first such programmes to integrate palliative care services into hospitals. As he explains in the article, this is not the norm. “From just 30 patients attending in 2009 and 100 in 2010, this number skyrocketed to 850 referrals in 2023. Last year, Abundant Life Palliative Care had provided care for a sum total of 10,000 patients.”
The 2024 PainSA congress, themed Personalized PAINCARE, offers a dynamic program focusing on individualised pain management approaches. With workshops covering essential pain medicine to advanced interventions, plenaries on pharmacological strategies and regenerative therapies, and interdisciplinary representation, the congress aims to educate and stimulate advancements in pain medicine and will feature a significant palliative care stream. Join us for an enriching experience and receive special rates when registering and paying prior to the 20th March 2024.
Congress Details
Date: 17 – 19 May 2024
Venue: Elangeni Hotel, North Beach, Durban
Organiser: Velocity Vision, +27 11 894 1278 or painsacongress@velocityvision.co.za
Dr. Margie Venter PALPRAC Clinical Director enlightens us on how to inform your healthcare team on what matters most to you when facinga serious illness.
Going on any journey means planning ahead. Also a cancer journey. Planningfor what’s likely, but also for the what-ifs. I’ve often thought this to be a much more useful cancer metaphor, as opposed to the war one. Wars imply winnersand losers, and often destruction in its wake.
Journeys can be gentle strolls, even if sometimes long. Other times journeys are much more difficult hikes, up hills with only the short relief of a plateau from time to time. It can feel as though you never quite reach the top to appreciate the view. Sometimes there are unexpected hailstorms or a break in the clouds allowing the warmth of sunshine. Sometimes it would have been better to turn left. Either way, it helps to plan a little, knowing where you’re supposed to be going and what you should pack.
The role of palliative care support in patients with hepato-pancreato-biliary cancers is significant.
Hepatocellular carcinoma is the second leading cancer in men and the third in women in sub-Saharan Africa, with an estimated 38 629 incident cases and 36 592 hepatocellular carcinoma-related deaths in 2020 for both sexes. Furthermore, more cancers are diagnosed late, and all these patients require palliative care support. Read more.
It is, therefore, appropriate that a whole day is dedicated to palliative care education at the conference, 16 May 2024 08:00 – 17:45. You can find more details here.
To view more details about the conference, click here.
Today is National Grief Awareness Day. The death of someone close to us is an event we are all likely to experience. And the grief that comes along with it. For many of us, we don’t know what to do or how to deal with grief – whether it’s our own or the grief of someone we know.
National Grief Awareness Day is an opportunity to talk about grief, and loss, in an open-hearted way, knowing that others are going through the same thing. A chance to support those who have lost someone they love, and are now trying to pick up the pieces of daily life.
Bridget McNulty’s story.
When my mom died very suddenly – 13 days from diagnosis till death – I looked for a book that would help me. I’m a writer and a reader, and books have helped me with every stage of my life… Like medicine, they can ease pain and shed a little light, and make things slightly easier to bear.
Except, I couldn’t find that book. I could find religious books about death, philosophical books about grief, and texts about grief counselling, but nothing warm, empathetic, and kind. I wanted something easy to read because my mind was foggy. I wanted something kind because life felt so hard. I wanted something that gave me space to express myself – rather than told me how I should be feeling. But I couldn’t find it – so I wrote it.
The Grief Handbook: A guide through the worst days of your life is the book I wished I’d had when my mom died. It’s a collection of all the things I found most helpful when I was grieving – from poems to podcasts to excerpts from books and articles – along with reflections on my grief journey, expert input on things like PTSD and complicated grief, and exercises that might help move through certain emotions. Things like colouring in and journaling, venting, and externalizing grief.
This year, together with two very wise women (artist Clare Louise Thomas of The LOVE Kitchen, and Alignd and Swansong co-founder Shivani Ranchod), I’ve created The Grief Course – an online companion through the grief journey. It’s an online course with zero expectations, self-directed and purely there to provide support and guidance as you move through grief.
My hope, with both The Grief Handbook and The Grief Course, is that others who are grieving can feel less alone. We are all in this together – this messy journey of loving, and losing those we love. Let’s be as kind as we can on the journey.
Bridget McNulty is the author of The Grief Handbook: A guide through the worst days of your life.
More than 30 000 health care workers are supported in clinical decision making by PACK.
The Practical Approach to Care Kit(PACK), also known as Adult Primary Care – APC, is a health systems improvement programme designed to support the work of primary care health workers in under served communities (like doctors, nurses, midwives, health officers, community health practitioners).
Since 1999, the PACK programme has been developed, implemented and evaluated in South Africa, and scaled up across primary care reaching more than 30 000 health workers.
PACK is a comprehensive clinical decision support guide, revised annually to keep up with health priorities.
Following the publication of PACK for use in Botswana that reflected WHO guidance on palliative care, in 2016, the PACK team at the Knowledge Translation Unit (KTU) collaborated with UCT palliative care clinicians to add content to reflect latest South African palliative care policy.
Clinicians are prompted to consider palliative care alongside routine care for serious illnesses.
This included a palliative care section, prompts for the clinician to consider palliative care alongside routine care for serious illnesses like HIV, DR-TB, dementia and stroke, as well as related training cases. Since then the content has been expanded and is updated annually, supporting health workers to identify and assist patients with palliative care needs.
Dr Camilla Wattrus, Knowledge Translation Unit, UCT (March 2020)
‘We can’t go back to the beginning and change what happened, but we can start from where we are and change the ending.’
CS Lewis
As a health care provider in clinical practice, I am acutely aware of how demanding our work can be. This is especially true for those in palliative care, for diverse reasons you are all very familiar with.
Taking time out to reflect, debrief, and re-imagine is essential for our well-being. Regular creative practice, particularly with the support of community, can help us manage our lives more creatively and less anxiously. To this end, the Life Righting Collective www.liferighting.com has been running writing courses for the past seven years. Last year Barbara Matthews invited me to share a PALPRAC online webinar presentation, and I then I ran a memoir course online for the PALPRAC community, and at the conference held in Cape Town this year, I presented what our NPO can offer health care providers, the terminally ill, and their carers.
The PALPRAC steering committee have supported my suggestion to offer a monthly Monday evening online forum for members, starting on Monday 19th of June from 7pm to 9pm. The first session will be a try out, thereafter, if you decide to sign up, there will be a charge of R600 for 6 months. I am open to suggestions according to your needs. The format I suggest is a short meditation to ‘arrive’ and check in with yourself, followed by a quick check in with the group. Then I will guide you to write about either some aspect of your life that strengthens your resilience, or else one that undermines your serenity.
The PALPRAC team is also keen that, where members are comfortable to do so, they eventually share their experiences as stories on the PALPRAC blog and the Life Righting Collective website – see examples of LRC members’ stories here [click here]. Advocacy in the form of story-telling can help to increase awareness and visibility, raise funds and grow compassion and understanding.
To book a place on Monday 19th June 2023 from 7 – 9 pm for the free try out session, please email Andrew at andrew.francis@palprac.org or 0827738467 and they will send you a Zoom invitation.
Should you wish to watch or listen to more information about our work, view below:
Neuroscience has shown that creativity is a birth right that helps us to learn, imagine, and foster relationships, yet we have been trained to ignore or to fear our own capacity for this life skill. All acts of creation and play – dance, music, drawing, singing, painting, collage, clay work, theatre – are valuable resources to help us find meaning and to manage our lives better. They provide insight, empathy, pleasure and a way to debrief from trauma.
I know from my own practice, and from running creative writing courses for the past twelve years, that creative writing is a valuable resource that helps us
to learn through play
to expand our ideas about who we are and what is possible,
to communicate more effectively, primarily with ourselves, getting clear about our habits, tendencies and motivations, and then with others if we choose to share our writing. This is a valuable tool for advocacy in the arena of palliative care
to step out of the trap of hope and fear, and into curiosity
to take agency in a situation that feels out of control or that feels as though it is victimising us
to grow confidence, to find and develop your voice and character
to find out what you think and feel
to learn how to be alone
to uncover or revisit the story you have been telling yourself about your life, and reimagine how to proceed where it is unhelpful of even harmful
to finish unfinished business, to put something you have been carrying down, by writing it down
to have fun and pleasure in situations that could overwhelm us if we did not find relief
We mostly don’t know what is going to happen next to our health, our finances, our education, our work, our economy, our community, our loved ones, and to those who are most vulnerable in our society. Once we have contributed everything we can to ameliorate a stressful situation, we are left with ourselves and our worries. Worrying, we know, is not helpful; in fact anxiety can contribute to illness.
This is an opportunity to do the writing that you perhaps have always wanted to do but did not know where to begin. Or perhaps you would like to step out of your comfort zone and learn a new skill.
The creative space is the holding space where we explore, discover, connect, learn. It is also, by definition, where we work with what we don’t know we don’t know; this practice of writing into the unknown can help us enormously with coming to terms with uncertainty in the rest of our lives.
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