Recently in the districts of Nyagatare, Rulindo, Gicumbi and Gasabo, health workers have undergone training in palliative health care.

Experts in this field are not common in Rwanda, but participants expressed optimism that the ministry of health, headed by Ntawukuriryayo Jean Damascene, is working to resolve this problem.

What is palliative care?

Palliative treatment means treatment that is designed to relieve symptoms rather than cure. Most medical treatment is palliative, for heart disease or diabetes, for example.

So it can be used at any stage of illness if there are troubling symptoms such as pain or sickness. Palliative treatment may help someone to live longer and to live comfortably, even if they cannot be cured.

Dr. Gerald Ngendahimana says that the care extended to such patients is not meant to cure, since their diseases are incurable, but to give them hope, and to enable them to learn how to live with their condition.

Palliative treatment does not just mean pain killers and anti-sickness drugs. Chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery can all be used palliatively. That is, to reduce symptoms without going for cure.

For example, surgery may be used to relieve a blocked bowel. The surgeon would remove as much of the cancer as necessary to relieve the obstruction even if the cancer had spread to another body organ such as the liver.

The operation would relieve severe nausea and vomiting and may give the person with the cancer more time feeling well.

Palliative care was promoted by a woman called Cicely, who developed an idea of going back to a medical school with a purpose of helping people with incurable diseases after realizing that patients were dying in great pain, yet doctors were reluctant in prescribing injections terminating their lives, so as to reduce pain.

She graduated as a medical doctor in 1957, and continued carrying on with special advocacy related to palliative care in United Kingdom, in 1966, she established a health facility which was catering for patients with incurable diseases, in South Western City of London.

Knowing when to use it

A middle aged lady told the participants that after learning she had cancer, her husband was of the view that they stop spending money on her illness, as she was not going to recover fully.

Rather than waste the money on health care, it would be better to spend it on their children. While a child’s future is always a parent’s top priority, this attitude is wrong.

It is reasonable to expect everything to be done to relieve your symptoms whether you are having curative or non-curative treatment.

Palliative treatment should really be used whenever necessary and there may be important palliative elements to a treatment that is aimed at curing your cancer.

Ends