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Uganda and Botswana - September 2025
This was two trips in one, the first half spent at our home base in Africa, St. Francis Naggalama Hospital in Uganda and the second half at the 8th International Palliative Care Conference in Gaborone, Botswana.
For this trip, in addition to our colleague Ben Schwarz MD of the Global Palliative Care Education team at Weill Cornell, we brought along Peggy Murphy and Kim Hong, two palliative care social workers also from Cornell. Even though they had never been to Africa before, Kim and Peggy were no strangers to many there as in 2023 they had presented a series of webinars on palliative care topics attended by over a hundred participants from all over Africa and beyond. On this trip, they gave lectures at the hospital to staff and village health workers as well as using their expertise seeing patients in the villages with psychosocial needs. It was great to have them there, being a real asset to the care of the palliative care patients.
During that first week, Ben, Randi, Prossy (the head palliative care nurse at Naggalama), and Howard made final preparations to launch our latest project studying the effectiveness of village health workers using their phones to show instructional videos on health topics such as cancer to people in the communities who otherwise don’t have access to such information. If successful, and we think it will be, this is a way of educating so many in areas with low health literacy and poor access to information.
And of course, we spent several days driving out to the villages to see patients with serious and life limiting illnesses, always our core purpose when we travel to Uganda.
(Go to the latest Blog page to see how the video project and seeing patients intersected at one point during our trip.)
Then it was off to Botswana, Howard, Randi, Ben, Prossy, Kim and Peggy, to present our work to a large delegation of attendees from all over the world; 52 countries at last count, from Cameroon to Cyprus, Ethiopia to Finland, or Mozambique to Malaysia, people from all over came to meet, to learn, and to discuss palliative care. It was very informative and hugely productive.
While there, Randi and Howard presented “Palliative Care Access and Sustainability in Rural Uganda Through Partnerships” , Ben presented “When You Have Cancer: Evaluating the Efficacy of an Educational Video for Cancer Patients and Caregivers in Uganda” as well as “Empowering Cancer Patients and Caregivers: Disseminating Educational Videos through Village Health Teams (VHTs) to Improve Cancer Awareness in Uganda” while Prossy presented “Palliative Care Sensitizations for Local Health Workers Increase Access and Delivery of Palliative Care Services. Peggy and Kim gave a workshop, “Helping the Healers: An Interactive Workshop about Western Perspective of Grief Theory and Interventions” which was well received. And during all of these talks, much of the time was spent meeting with people interested in using our videos and educational curricula in their own countries.
Here's some pictures of this trip.
Uganda - May 2025
At the time of this post, our team in Uganda, the St. Francis Naggalama Hospital Palliative Care Outreach Team has now cared for over 1000 patients over the many years we have partnered with them, providing palliative relief in an under-resourced area of rural Uganda. This trip we spent many long days going out to the far-reaching communities, at times traveling over an hour along deeply rutted dirt roads, to see a homebound patient with severe chronic or terminal illness. We have learned much along this journey, and will continue to support this important endeavor as long as we can.
Besides our work in the field, w had several meetings with organizations with whom we are working to improve palliative care:
We met with the ERIC Cancer Initiative, an organization in East Africa working to combat breast cancer in Uganda, with a specific focus on early detection and prevention. In the past few months, they have helped us with one of our ongoing projects to educate the public in East Africa on breast cancer using video tools that we are developing. We look forward to an ongoing partnership with ERIC.
We also met with our partners at Solar Health Uganda who are providing free, small, solar powered lights to our patients to improve their quality of palliative care during the nighttime hours. We are collecting data to show the efficacy of such a simple measure to improve their quality of care and reduction of suffering.
We also made time on this busy trip to meet with our research partners, The African Palliative Care Association and The Palliative Care Association of Uganda to discuss our ongoing projects evaluating the benefits of using videos to educate patients, village health volunteers, and healthcare workers in the rural communities where resources are limited and health literacy is severely lacking, particularly about cancer. We hope to present our data on the impact of these projects at upcoming international palliative care meetings in Tunisia and Botswana in the coming months. This will help us get governmental approval to distribute these educational videos widely on a global level.
Tanzania ~ April 2025
In April, 2025 Dr. Diamond was invited to speak on palliative care in neurologic conditions at the 11th Annual Global Neurosurgery Course at the Muhimbili Orthopaedic Institute (MOI) in Tanzania. Neurosurgeons, spine surgeons, plastic surgeons, and nurses from all over the globe participated.
Uganda January 2024 Trip
Photos from our
November 2023 Trip:
Photos from our November 2023 Trip
September, 2022
A half and half kind of trip, we returned this month to Naggalama to travel the villages and see palliative care patients, but this time we spent time in the capital city of Kampala at the 7th International African Palliative Care Conference, a once every three year event, this time conveniently for us in Uganda. As I've said before, Naggalama is only 35 Kms from Kampala, but a million miles away. In every metric imaginable, the rural communities and the urban setting are so different from each other; it is a culture shock traveling from one to the other.
In the villages, it was great to see how the palliative care (PC) team has weathered the pandemic through all kinds of obstacles, continue to care for the suffering patients that don't have ready access to healthcare services. But also it was great to get an opportunity to present our educational curriculum that we have been developing over the last few years to an international audience and receiving wonderful feedback and making partnerships to disseminate our work to many countries.
And the biggest surprise at the conference was when the St. Francis Naggalama Palliative Care program was recognized for “Contribution to Improving Access to Palliative Care Services in Africa”, this little hospital in rural Africa sharing the honor with large national and international service organizations. We are so proud of Prossy and her team for becoming a resource for doctors, nurses and palliative care organizations from around the world to learn about sustainable delivery of PC in under-resourced areas.
Here are some pictures from this trip:
