About me
I am pioneering the cause of palliative care in the tribal state of Jharkhand in India through our hospice called KOSISH, which is a registered NGO. Our teams of professional workers provide care free of cost to the community & work as professional unpaid volunteers. We have been providing our services to the community since 2006. The Govt. of India does not recognize palliative care as a specialty & hence there is no govt. policy for it & hence no funding. Narcotic rules vary from state to state & administrators in most areas consider a low priority issue. Illiteracy, poverty, ignorance are the rule of the day. Most people do not have access to basic health amenities & care of the terminally ill remains a low-priority issue with them. Death means a mouth less to feed – economics simplified! But this sad scenario has not stopped us from implementing palliative care services. We have been doing what we can by pooling in our personal savings & donating our professional expertise & time…but then without financial help, even this has a limit & I am afraid that we are approaching it now. We basically rely on resources that are locally available, accessible, affordable & culturally acceptable. The strong familial ties in most Indian cultures have proved to be a boon in these resource deprived communities. Love, personal care & an empathetic attitude of the people have perhaps done a great deal where scientifically proven measures could not be accessed. Lack of availability of morphine has not deterred us – we began using pentazocine lactate which was locally available along with Tramadol & ketamine. Scientific papers were published with the use of the same taking into account its safety profile & acceptability in the community. “Discovering your voice” was the theme chosen for the World Hospice & Palliative care day this year…this gave us the inspiration to undertake a Herculean task; to assess the peoples awareness of palliative care & its importance in our society on the basis of random interviews taken from a broad cross section of people from various castes, creeds, socio-economic backgrounds, cultural backgrounds; in short representing the true India. This was not planned as a formal “study” with statistical analysis of data, etc. but rather based on a casual tour involving less traveled parts of India, in fact involving parts of India which even most Indians have not traveled to. We completed this programme called “Hospice Tour India” covering seven states & 3000 km over 10 days by pooling in our personal savings as we did not have access to grants. I am an anesthetist by profession having done my MD from All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi in 1995, FRCA(Part I) in 1996, Fellowship in palliative medicine in 2007 & trained in pediatric palliative care from Warsaw. I also have a Fellowship(Aesculap academy) in Pain medicine.
