By Golden Kang’oma Junior
Salima, October 3, Mana: Ireland Ambassador to Malawi, Sèamus ÒGrady has hailed ‘Ndi Moyo’ palliative Care a Non-Governmental Organization for providing palliative care services to patients and for imparting palliative care knowledge to health workers across the country.
Speaking during a closing ceremony of a five weeks Palliative Care Initiators course on Sunday, he said that Malawi does not have enough palliative care providers and the trainings that the organization was providing would enhance services provided to the patients and fill the existing gap.
“This is a very good gesture as the organization is increasing a number of palliative care service providers, so this means that outside of hospitals will have more people being offered good services that they could not have had. It is to my expectation that palliative care services in the country will be enhanced,” ÒGrady said.
He said his country would continue to support such initiatives and asked the trained palliative care initiators to fully utilize the knowledge gained.
Ndi Moyo Palliative Care Country Director, Bisani Mphongolo said his organization has achieved a great milestone for training 104 health workers since 2015 and they are yet to provide more trainings with an online platform.
“This is significant as it is complementing governments efforts in providing well trained palliative care providers, what we want is to close the gap between patients and service providers in the country,” he said.
Mphongolo highlighted that the online training would enable them to train more caregivers because at the moment they are being limited by space.
“At first we were having 20 participants per year, so to increase our capacity we will start online courses which we will be having over 60 initiators,” he said.
One of the trained Palliative Care Initiators, Mable Banda said that with the skills they have gained they would take palliative care to great heights and promote palliative care services in the country.
