Palliative care is, broadly speaking, care for patients with life-limiting diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, but also heart failure and advanced lung diseases.
In Uganda we see cancer and HIV/AIDS very often. Sometimes we see a patient with heart failure, but advanced lung diseases are much less common.
At Hospice Tororo we work very closely with the general hospital in Tororo. We make rounds several days a week in the ward, identifying new patients, following up with existing patients, meeting with medical staff to make plan on the treatment/therapy and to see what problems the nurses in the wards are facing when they care for our patients.
It is common for nurses from the hospital to ask about lung diseases, heart failure and even cancer. This week though a nurse asked me to explain what HIV is.
I let her first tell me what she knows about HIV before I started to explain things. I was happy that she approached me and was willing to learn more about HIV/AIDS, but at the same time I was astonished by the fact that she knew very little about it, not even the basics.
I called the rest of her team together to explore what their level of knowledge was. Some knew a small amount more, but the overall knowledge about HIV/AIDS was still very little.
This surprised me. Many people in Uganda are affected by HIV/AIDS, the government is having large campaigns to fight HIV. And still I was talking to health care professionals who knew very little.
It is important that these knowledge levels rise. 30% of the HIV patients in Uganda are diagnosed with cancer, related to the HIV and the nurses need to know about these diseases as well.
After I explained to the nurses some basics and encouraged them to keep asking questions I went out to visit the Matron, the person in the hospital in charge of the nurses. She told me that the nurses had several extra trainings, but each time the teacher used so complex language that the nurses did not understand much of it.
As such, we decided that Hospice Tororo will design an education program on topics related to palliative care for the medical staff in the hospital, starting with HIV/AIDS. This will benefit our patients but also any other patient they will care for in the future.
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