We are happy to announce our second project which we are initiating, utilising the funds pledged by our members for flood relief and rehabilitation. After looking at various projects by different organisations, we have tied up with Palliium India for one of their projects.
Pallium India is a nationally registered charitable trust formed in 2003. Its vision is to enable an India in which palliative care is integrated in all health care so that every person has access to effective pain relief and quality palliative care along with disease–specific treatment and across the continuum of care. Pallium India works in collaboration with several national and international organizations to improve the accessibility palliative care services in India including availability of affordable pain relief drugs (opioids) and other low-cost medicines, and to integrate provision of palliative care within the health care system at all levels.
Major activities of Pallium India include:
1. Clinical care: in-patient, out-patient, and home visits services with an emphasis on care at home as far as possible.
2. Half-way home: rehabilitation unit for people with paraplegia.
3. Educational support programme for children of patients who are at risk of dropping out of school because of health care
expenditure and social issues in the family.
4. Bereavement support programme
5. International, national and state-wide advocacy and awareness projects
Kerala experienced the worst floods in a century, in August 2018. More than one million people have sought shelter in relief camps. Several categories of the affected people are particularly vulnerable, particularly those with pre-existing serious illness, those with disabilities, the elderly and children. As can be imagined, their plight in the aftermath of a natural calamity could be much worse than that of healthy people. They need palliative care much more than during normal times. This proposal is for a scheme to get such care across to them in collaboration with local resources, both governmental and NGOs. Typically in a humanitarian crisis resulting from a natural disaster, people with pre-existing illness are likely to be marginalised. Pallium’s focus is not only on bedridden patients or patients with advanced or terminal illness, but on all patients with serious health-related suffering and their families, including those, who were already receiving palliative care /medical care which has been interrupted, those with disabilities, those who are elderly, those who are children vulnerable to suffering, those who develop serious health related suffering from the disaster, and/ or those who have a worsening of pre-existing problems as a result of the floods.
In collaboration with CETAAC, Pallium has drawn out action plans for providing assistive devices and physical aids to the needy, 50 patients considering 3 to 4 months’ time. (such as Wheel chair, Tripod, Commode, Walker & Hearing aids).
