Developmental Opportunities
Throughout the course of our project, while there were limited opportunities locally, we have nonetheless attended various in-person workshops as well as sourcing for international webinars to supplement our knowledge pertaining to the topic of palliative care.
The first 2 opportunities we came across were international webinars held by various institutions such as The University of Edinburgh and Asia Pacific Hospice Palliative Care Network (APHN).
Back in October (25th), when the team’s target group was still caregivers of children who are terminally ill under palliative care, we attended a workshop held by APHN. The workshop was conducted by the vice-president of Hong Kong Society of Children’s Palliative Care who has worked with these children in Hong Kong relating to the physical and psychosocial challenges these children and families face. It was shared that while limited in information pertaining to how Complementary Medication like acupuncture can help with the patients’ pains, the parents’ desperation would nonetheless lead them to attempt it in order to soothe their child’s pains. We discovered that regardless of the countries, caregivers of these children are likely to experience poorer mental and physical health when caring for their loved ones, leading to emotional distress, physical fatigue or even the development of depressive symptoms, altogether resulting in a poorer quality of life. These information are congruent with the findings from our interviews with local organisations, where these caregivers also often find themselves pondering about the past, about how they could have done something differently to perhaps prevent their child’s death. These intrusive thoughts can leave these caregivers distressed and cause them to experience prolonged grief, guilt, and poorer adjustment in bereavement following the death of their loved one.
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The next webinar (27 Oct and 3 Nov) was held by the University of Edinburgh and comprised many renown professionals from institutions like WHO and APHN in the field of palliative care. This webinar focuses on palliative care education for lower middle income countries. Each online workshop was 90 minutes long, and aimed to explore and share the experience of Higher Education Institutions worldwide in providing palliative care education. The workshop also looked at ways to establish and improve primary palliative care and palliative care in humanitarian settings in lower and middle income countries. While the general content delivered in this online workshop was inapplicable to Singapore and our project’s context, it is shared on how in many low and middle-income countries like Myanmar, the presence of difficulty or lack of access to pain relief and palliative care is not uncommon. Conversely, Singapore is one of the few South-East Asian countries alongside Japan and South Korea to provide adequate and easy to access pain management and palliative care services, which illustrates how our team has been provided with the necessary tools and resources to tackle our project scope.
The final workshop we attended as part of our community mapping was an in-person palliative care workshop held by Singapore Hospice Council (SHC) on 16 November 2022. This workshop provided the team with immense insights into palliative care. The session started first with an introduction to palliative care, followed by how we can approach the topic tactfully. The session was catered to encompass all palliative care patients, children and adults alike. During the session, SHC staff members provided all participants with a deck of their conversation cards. After the session, we approached the staff members regarding how they were able to craft their conversation cards regarding a sensitive topic so tactfully. It is said that the cards were generally kept lighthearted, which aided in the formation of our final cards, where we decided to incorporate our cards into our activity sessions using their strategies.