Palliative Care

Ok, so it's a two post night. This post is in response to Tyronebcookin who asked that I give more specifics about the palliative care program on Mercy Ships so here it is. Thanks for asking, Tyrone!

The PC program became an official program this outreach. In years past, Mercy Ships has done PC but never had a budget or anything. The PC team is made up of two nurses (Jean and me), one translator, and then we have 4 crew members who go out with us when their schedules permit.

From a nursing perspective, PC is like home health care rather than hospice care back home (at least in the States). We have patients that are referred to us that need some sort of ongoing support because they have a condition that we can't help with on the ship. Most of the time they have a terminal condition but not always. We go to their homes and do wound care, provide pain medications, do lots of teaching. We also provide emotional and spiritual support - this includes praying, reading Scripture, doing Bible studies. We've tried support groups but Liberians don't talk about death or feelings or anything that makes a support group work. After a patient dies, we continue to visit the family to give them support.

Most of our patients have cancer and most of them are children, although we received 3 new patients this week who are all adults. We work M-F from about 7:30 - 5:00. We don't have a car on the weekends so we can't do any weekend visits.

We get our patients, usually through screenings done by the ship (dental, maxillo-facial, eye). People come to the ship for help and when we see it is something that is malignant or something we don't have the expertise for, they get referred to PC. We've gotten a couple of patients just walking in the market. We don't have a big enough budget or enough PC staff to seek out patients in the community.

It's a great job but emotionally and spiritually demanding. I'll be taking over the PC program in Sierra Leone since my partner Jean is leaving in January. We, hopefully, will be getting another nurse to replace Jean but it really needs to be someone who will be staying the majority of the outreach in Sierra Leone (until Nov).

Tyrone, if you or your wife have more questions, please feel free to email me at mzeller27@yahoo.com.

Peace,
Michele