Patients and carers came together to discuss legal issues in palliative care at a day-long workshop on Legal Assistance for Patients and Families in Palliative Care in Narayanganj City Corporation, Bangladesh.
The workshop was organised as part of the Narayanganj Palliative Care project, funded by UK Aid Direct. It took place in November 2018 in the city’s West Devogoghal Nagar Health Center.
This was a joint workshop run in collaboration with BRAC legal aid department, Narayanganj office.
Members of the local community, people accessing palliative care and their families and carers, and project staff and volunteers attended the workshop.
Attendees discussed the following issues:
- patient and carer rights
- property, wills and inheritance
- gender issues in legal aspects of palliative care.
The audience engaged in a lively discussion on the topics raised during the presentations, raising questions of how the theory presented related to their own situations.
Professor Nezamuddin Ahmad, head of the Department of Palliative Medicine at BSMMU and project leader, said: “It was excellent to see the interest in this important but often neglected aspect of palliative care. Many members of the community attended the workshop and I believe that they all came away with valuable knowledge on legal considerations during serious illness and at the end of life.
“Palliative care is extremely important in taking care of the patient’s physical, psycho-social, emotional and spiritual needs. However, it is easy to forget the impact that legal issues can have on each of these dimensions.”
The Narayanganj Palliative Care project is building a compassionate community in Bangladesh working towards universal health coverage.
It is a collaboration between the Worldwide Hospice Palliative Care Alliance, and the Department of Palliative Medicine at BSMMU, funded by UK Aid from the British people.
Read more about the project on the WHPCA website.
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