Doctors Worldwide has been running the Palliative Care Project in Rwanda since 2019. If you aren’t familiar with palliative care, it is the type of care provided to patients who are diagnosed with life-limiting illnesses, and is based on the idea that “there is always something we can do”. We take a holistic approach to palliative care that encompasses areas like mental, spiritual, social and medical support.
Although palliative care is provided in Rwanda’s public hospitals and private hospices, our local team is the only one delivering home-based palliative care in the capital city of Kigali. Providing home-based palliative care to patients from vulnerable and low-income communities, especially in a hilly city like Kigali requires our nurses to hail motorbike rides to patient neighbourhoods and hike up steep hills to their houses (often housing rents are cheaper higher up in the mountains) to deliver the necessary care. This journey is often difficult, time-consuming and expensive for patients to undertake, which is why many palliative care patients do not even opt to visit the local hospital for routine check-ups. Usually, once a patient is diagnosed with a life-limiting illness, they go home to families who do not have the knowledge or capacity to care for them effectively, not just medically, but also in terms of psychosocial support. All these reasons make home-based palliative care vital for many patients.
As important as it is to recognise the people and the communities we serve, as well as their stories, we believe it is also crucial to recognise our local team (both healthcare and other professionals) on the ground who deliver vital home-based palliative services tirelessly and with so much love and care. On our deployment to Rwanda this year, we not only had the opportunity to follow our local team on their home-based palliative care journeys but we also got to engage with them closely and discuss the care they provide.
Meet our team in Rwanda:
Aisha & Ramla, Palliative Care Nurses
Both Aisha and Ramla are nurses who provide home-based palliative care services to patients in Kigali. They currently oversee x number of critical patients and x number of stable patients each. Providing home-based palliative care means both Aisha and Ramla spend a considerable amount of time getting to know our patients and their families in order to build a relationship of trust with them, and allow them to provide the medical, spiritual and psycho-social support the patients require.
Aimee, Social Worker
Aimee is our social worker who also works on our Medical Debt Relief Project. According to our team, she can often be found at the local hospitals we work with more than at our office in Kigali. Aimee spends a lot of time working with the social department at the local hospitals, to identify patients from low-income backgrounds who either require palliative care or assistance through our Medical Debt Relief Project.
Hashim, Administrator & Communications Officer
Although Hashim is our Administrator and Communications Officer, he wears a lot of other hats and supports many other tasks, such as data collection. Alongside Hashim’s job role and duties, he too spends a considerable amount of time with our palliative care patients as he often assists our nurses in communicating with the patients at different points of their palliative care journeys. Hashim plays a key role in coordinating various elements that go into our Palliative Care Project, whether that be putting together our patient files or communicating patient impact stories.
Hassan, Driver
Our driver Hassan plays a key role in ensuring the transport of our palliative care patients. Every day, he takes many of our patients from different corners of Kigali from their homes – often situated high up the hills and requiring 15-20 min hikes to reach and transport the patients from their houses to the van – and then drives them to the local public hospital for their check-ups, stays with them until they are done, and then transports the patients for the day back to their homes. Hassan also drives all our volunteers and staff through rough terrain to take them to their home visits every Sunday.
Palliative Care Volunteers
Currently, we have a team of 21 permanent volunteers who are assigned to different palliative care patients, depending on their location. Our volunteers check in on their allocated palliative care patients weekly across all of our triage levels (red = critical patients with complex or uncontrolled symptoms, amber = uncontrolled/changeable symptoms, green = well-controlled symptoms) and report back to our nurses, who update patient files and intervene if a patient is unstable. Every Sunday, all our volunteers, staff members and local board members travel to visit 3-4 patients as a means of showing community support and offering a social focused check-in.
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Thanks to your support, our Palliative Care project has continued successfully for many years, providing essential services and care to hundreds of patients. Without the dedication of our team in Rwanda to continue their work every day despite the physical challenges and emotional impact of connecting with and serving patients receiving end-of-life care, this would not have been possible. Moreover, without your vital donations, this programme could not have continued for so long, and maintained its goal of offering community-based and holistic care, not just for patients, but their families as well.
Donate today to ensure our project is able to continue expanding to provide further services and care to current patients, and those on our waiting list.
