Nepal

Kathmandu

International Nepal Fellowship

Services Offered

We are conducting a needs assessment for palliative care in Nepal and working on developing models of palliative care appropriate to Nepal, in collaboration with the Nepalese Association for Palliative Care.

We are also involved in service delivery at Green Pastures Hospital and Rehabilitation Centre in Pokhara where we have two beds and are starting a community service. We are planning to upgrade this service as a centre for education and research for which we will establish a 15 bed inpatient unit. The clinical unit will be the focus for training.

Our activities will focus particularly on development of palliative care for remote rural areas and on training health care professionals who work in these areas – GPs, nurses and mid-level health workers.

Uses of SPICT

We are using SPICT for our needs assessment work. We have developed a Nepal version of SPICT and tested this out at United Mission, Tansen Hospital, in a 160 bedded hospital in West Nepal. We have linked SPICT in to a rural performance scale which we have also piloted, since tools such as the Karnofsky or Palliative Performance Scale are do not work well in rural Nepal.

SPICT will enable us to identify patients who are likely to benefit from palliative care for our surveys in hospitals and in the community.

We are planning a series of hospital surveys initially followed by a survey of palliative care needs in rural areas affected by the 2015 massive earthquake in Nepal.

Website: International Nepal Fellowship

Contact:   Dan Munday