Awareness camp on Palliative Care

BANGALORE: Commemorating World Hospice and Palliative Care Day, Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology is organising awareness camp across four colleges in the city from Saturday. The Institute is focussing on youth to serve as volunteers to help end-stage cancer patients, especially the elderly, who need palliative care. “The students can help in their own way.It could be as little as helping the endstage cancer patients living in their surrounding areas to reach hospital or fetching medicine from the hospital and deliver to them.Those interested about serving these patients can undergo training at the Kidwai hospital” said Dr Linge Gowda, HOD, Palliative Medicine, Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology.The theme for this year is ‘many diseases, many lives, many voices-palliative care for non communicable conditions’.The theme will focus on how people living with conditions which are not infectious and can benefit from palliative care.Dr Gowda expressed his concern that less than 2-3 per cent of cancer patients in the country were getting palliative care.He said, “Palliative care is more than just providing specialist pain relief.It is about seeing them as a living person, and not as a dying patient.It is a process of adding life to their remaining days in the life span.”