I spent a productive week at Dumfries this May working with the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group on our project funded by the Scottish Funding Council on “Assessing the Quality and Outcomes in a Community Form of Palliative Care Delivery in Kerala, India”. In this post, I reflect on the genesis of this project,… Continue reading
Recently, I had the privilege of going to India as part of our project “Creating a framework for assessing community based palliative care in Kerala” There, I was able to attend the Indian Association of Palliative Care’s annual conference and spend a week working alongside Dr. Devi Vijay from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta,… Continue reading
As part of our GCRF Project ‘Evaluating Community Palliative Care in Kerala, India’, the members of the project team gathered in Dumfries in November 2018, at the University of Glasgow School of Interdisciplinary Studies Campus, to kick off this new project with a series of workshops discussing strategy, research methods, and objectives for the project. As… Continue reading
In January 2012 I began studying for a cross-disciplinary PhD supervised by David Clark and Sandy Whitelaw from the End of Life Studies Team at the University of Glasgow’s Dumfries Campus. My thesis, entitled ‘The Treatment of Pain in India: power and practice’, was borne from the notion that global health improvement initiatives, despite being… Continue reading
Kerala’s community model for palliative care has sustained attention in global palliative care discourse, as an alternative, resource-effective form of organizing. What distinguishes the community model from professional-centric models such as hospices and hospitals, is that the community volunteers serve as the anchor in coordinating ‘total-care’ – i.e., medical, social, financial support and rehabilitation –… Continue reading
In a briefing note published in 2009, the World Health Organization estimated ‘that 5 billion people… have no or insufficient access to treatment for moderate to severe pain’ . Much of the dialogue related to this lack of access has focused on the availability of the opioid drug morphine, but despite several high profile… Continue reading
