This year, IAM’s Community Based Palliative Care (CBPC) Project began! CBPC is a pilot project that aims to help patients who have lifespan limiting illnesses, their families, communities, and local health care providers to enable an optimal quality of life for these patients. Palliative care serves patients with active, progressive, far-advanced disease with a limited life expectancy, focusing on their dignity and quality of life. While Afghanistan currently has no palliative care services, our hope is that by working in a community-based fashion, the CBPC Project will help to build the capacity of local health care professionals to provide basic palliative care, and also help patients, families, and communities to know what they can do, too. When the entire community comes together to support a patient, patients can live and die with dignity – being cared for physically, emotionally, and spiritually. And as communities learn to support and work together in this way, long-term, sustainable practices can be created.
Over the course of 2020, the CBPC Project team met together to develop teaching materials and plan the future of the project.
While 2020 was just the beginning of the project, CBPC plans to network, mentor, and spread knowledge about palliative care principles and practices. We will first train professionals for the project, and then surveying local communities, physicians, patients, families to determine what is needed. After that, we will establish professional and community networks, teach local physicians about palliative care basics, and set up referral systems for the CBPC Project.
When a patient is referred to the CBPC team, we will meet with the patient, their family, and their doctors in the hospital to create a relationship with the physician and introduce the family to the project, and then begin meeting and caring for the patient in their own home.
During the initial meeting with the family, the CBPC team will discuss goals of care and work together with the family to create and agree upon a care plan, after which wholistic patient and family care will begin. Initially, the CBPC team will model and teach the care in a mentoring relationship with the family, but the goal of mentoring is to pass the responsibility of care to the family and local community. Once the care has been passed on, CBPC will continue to follow up with the family to manage the patient’s evolving physical care needs as well as the mental and emotional needs of the patient and family, including the period of bereavement.
By working with an entire community, the CBPC Project will impact everyone involved, enabling participants to work together for the comfort and needs of the patient, while building the capacity of the community and medical community to be an effective part of that powerful, intimate, and life changing process.