Achieving Excellence in Palliative Care: Ghana’s Comprehensive 5 – years Strategic Plan – UHC

Palliative care plays a crucial role in modern healthcare by providing compassionate and holistic support to individuals facing serious illnesses. It focuses on improving the quality of life for patients and their families by addressing physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs.

Achieving excellence in palliative care requires a comprehensive, patient-centered approach that emphasizes empathy, effective communication, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Palliative Care is both a specialized medical care and an approach of care that can be implemented in any medical care practice for persons with chronic conditions, serious illness, terminal situations others; regardless of their age. It can be initiated at any stage of the trajectory of the disease and works best from the onset of the problem. Palliative Care works with these key cores – patients centeredness; interdisciplinary collaboration; comprehensive symptom management; holistic family support and inclusiveness; effective communication and culture sensitivity and inclusivity.

Some of the numerous benefits of palliative Care Excellence are improved quality of life and healthcare services, enhanced patient and family satisfaction, reduced hospital stay, avoidance of unnecessary hospitalization, reduced healthcare cost and better end-of-life outcomes.

Globally, palliative care is emphasized in the month of October. The Ghana Palliative Care Association, the mother association of all recognized palliative care practitioners and Advocates in Ghana has earmarked from this year, the 10th month as: October for Palliative Care Excellence in Ghana. 

To celebrate the maiden occasion of this program; the Ghana Palliative Care Association is going to run several activities from the 1st of October to the 31st of October including stakeholder meeting/ engagement, webinars, CPDs, symposium and fundraising ball. One the 4th to 6th pf October at 3pm to 6pm each day, the Ghana Palliative Care Association will host a Webinar to discuss the draft of Ghana’s 5–year strategic palliative care program that is to run from January 2025 to December, 2030 under the UHC 2020 to 2030 policy under the Ministry of Health.

The main objective of these activities is to raise funding towards running of a pilot Palliative care program for Ghana for the next 5 years with the blueprint of the 5–year strategic plan under the MoH’s UHC Policy 2020 to 2030. 

This conference is to address some of the challenges facing the association, such as; Limited access for all patients, Misconceptions and Stigmatization and Shortage of Workforce. 

On the 11th of October which is International celebration of Children Palliative Care Day, Ghana will have its HatsOn4CPC. GPCA urges everyone to put on hat take a beautiful picture with the caption “#HatsOn4CPC” and post on social media.

And on October 12th, 2024, at Alisa Hotel from 9am to 4pm, there will be grand symposium to collect inputs on the draft for the MoH-Ghana’s 5 years strategic plan for palliative program under the UHC 2020 to 2030. 

There will be a fundraising ball at 7pm to 10pm on the same day to support Ghana’s pilot Palliative Care Program which is to run from 2025 to 2030 based on the blueprint of the strategic plan.

You can also purchase a ticket with the short code *365*88*482# to purchase a ticket for the fund-raising ball.

Also note that you can contribute any amount towards Ghana Palliative Care Program by dialing the short code: *365*88*482# from the 1st of October to 31st of December, 2024, as our target is to raise 50,000,000 cedis to support the Ghana Palliative Care Program.

Kindly RSVP by 30th of September, using the following link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e1FAlpQLSeKJjmsJ285U09xvNFuvWvqj|41r1IbROkBb7sxznc5_Ry-uA/viewform?usp=pp_url to confirm your attendance and receive the webinar access details.

If you have any preliminary questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to reach out to the GPCA Secretariat via info.ghpca@gmail.com or +233 24 524 1645.

Invited partners for this conference are; African Palliative Association Care, Ministry of Health, World Health Organization, United Nations, Ghana Health Service, UNICEF, International Children Palliative Care Network, World Hospice Palliative Care, and International Association of Palliative and Hospice Care. 

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Together, we can shape the future of palliative care in Ghana.

Thank you for your continued support and commitment.