Families grieving for relatives who succumb to terminal illnesses can benefit from a new grief and bereavement care service being piloted by palliative care providers. According to Iddi Matovu, a Public Health Specialist at Kitovu Mobile, a palliative care provider that’s piloting the care in Masaka, they embarked on research on how to support caregivers and relatives, having realized that many are plunged into agony and sometimes full-blown mental illness after loss. Matovu says the facility lost 35 clients who were under palliative care last year and they have since trained community health workers to help them after working with clinical psychologists in Zimbabwe to come up with a bereavement packages.
He says the aim is to avert the increasing number of people developing mental illness partly due to failure to come to terms with such losses. Mark Donald Mwesiga the Executive Director at the Palliative Care Association of Uganda (PCAU) said bereavement care comes in handy at a time when the cultural fabric of mourning is breaking down due to changes in the social – economic set up of the country. Mwesiga who was speaking on the sidelines of a donation event organized by PCAU as part of their 25th anniversary noted that while this care has not been very pronounced, they have been equipping palliative care providers with such skills to support families going through difficult moments by partly providing them with appropriate counseling.
Already, he says, several hospices.