community care for the living dead

There was this lady in my neighbourhood when I was growing up. Ever since I remember her, she was frail with wrinkles and white hair. She lived alone and one day I heard she was no more. She had been really unwell for a while and with no one to take care of her and tired of her increased stays at the hospital, and knowing she didn’t have much to live anyway, she committed suicide. I wish she had known about the Palliative Care network in Kerala.

Most people who are incurably ill need a little more than physical and medical support alone. Psycho-social and spiritual care is equally important, which is very difficult to materialize through institutionalized care. The physical complexities of progressive and life threatening disease, coupled with attendant emotional and psychological consequences, demand careful coordination between primary, secondary, and tertiary care. The community approach is the only realistic model for achieving significant coverage and continuity of services for terminally ill. This is a realistic option in most communities where inter personal relationships have not yet fully died out. And the Palliative care movement in Calicut, the teeming volunteers and the impact it has been creating over two decades shows that it is not just a pipe dream.

Reaching out to the world to learn and share

Concern Without Borders is an initiative that grew out of the experience of the Pain and Palliative Care Society in leveraging volunteers to create huge social impact in healthcare.

What started in 1993 as a pain clinic in a small room in Kozhikode Medical College in Kerala, has now grown into a mass movement with almost 30,000 volunteers trained and skilled in caring for the terminally ill. Care given through this network of volunteers was recently termed by Economist Intelligence Unit as a 'beacon of hope' for the world. Around 300 such self-sustaining palliative centres are functional today in the state of Kerala, accounting for nearly two-third of such centres in the whole of India. The Society now aims of expanding its reach and the network of volunteers to replicate this model in others parts of India and the world, and strengthen its existing operations.

Concern Without Borders is an attempt to learn from this unique experience and apply it for programmes beyond palliative care. We believe that the real empowerment of people at the grass-root level can be the catalyst that can bring huge social change. We also believe that there are many out there who have it in them to contribute to build and nurture such volunteering networks across the world, and demonstrate Concern without Borders.

This blog and other social media network we will be using hereafter is our attempt to reach out to the world and share what we have been doing in the last fifteen years and to learn from similar initiative from around the world.