Hospice Ethiopia UK is delighted that our trustee, Freddie Collins, attended this year’s Palliative Care Congress in Belfast. This is the UK’s annual conference for palliative care practitioners and researchers. Here is her feedback:
“I was presenting an audit I completed while I lived in Ethiopia in 2024. For this audit, I went through the records of 100 patient notes to find out what symptoms they experienced and what medications the Hospice Ethiopia (HE) team used to manage their symptoms.
The main symptom that patients experienced was pain. 95% of cancer patients, and 91% of patients with HIV, experienced pain. On the first visit made by the HE team, only 5% of patients had their pain controlled. By their last visit, this proportion had increased to 60%. Most importantly, only 33% of patients had access to morphine, which is an essential medication to treat pain in patients at the end of their lives.
This audit shows two things. Firstly, how brilliant the HE nurses are! Even though they have a limited selection of tablet pain relief medications, they are still able to drastically improve pain in their patients. This is because, with your ongoing support, they are able to provide psychological, spiritual and economic support which helps to soothe pain in multi-dimensional ways.
Secondly, this audit highlights how an unmet need for pain control still does exist, as 40% of patients remain with uncontrolled pain at the end of their lives, but two thirds do not have access to oral morphine. If this study was repeated now on patients currently registered with Hospice Ethiopia, the access to oral morphine would probably be even more limited.
This inequitable access to morphine is a global problem. We can read in the 2018 Lancet Commission on Palliative Care and Pain Relief, how half of the global population receives less than 1% of global morphine supply. This audit therefore supports the urgent need for a reliable supply of oral morphine in Ethiopia and we hope that the Ethiopian government’s plan to develop a national morphine production unit will advance soon.”
Hospice Ethiopia UK 