Experts for palliative care for elderly people
With an estimated six lakh victims of incurable diseases, Bangladesh has started responding to their demands offering them the "palliative care," known otherwise the comfort care, experts said.
"It (palliative care) is a new treatment approach for people of dying state, but the demand is enormous," Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU) Vice-Chancellor Professor Dr Pran Gopal Datta told the news agency on Saturday.
He said BSMMU was offering the service for the past three years with 15 beds while some half a dozen voluntary or philanthropic organisations joined the campaign to meet a growing demand from families having patients of stroke, cancer and neurological, emotional and psychological disorders.
Datta said the number of hospital beds appeared very insufficient and the lone public medical university would double the beds for rendering care for sick people of all ages suffering from incurable illnesses in few months to offer the service at the least possible cost.
The UK-based Sir William Beverage Foundation (SWBF) is one of pioneering charity to offer palliative care in Bangladesh, a country where World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that more than 600,000 people require the service at present.
SWBF's Bangladesh chapter head of operations Major General (retd) Jiban Kanai Das said they were currently rendering free of cost services to nearly 200 poor or ultra poor patients, 80 percent of them suffered stroke, in Dhaka since May 2008.
"But the demand is so high that more philanthropic organizations need to step in the field immediately to help families and patients of their terminal stage of life," he said.
"This is a great help for me," admits Ivy, 40, who abandoned her plan to get married as her elderly father has nobody to look after at his end life as none of her five brothers and five sisters could spare time to see their father, now 85 years old and unable to move.
Social scientists say individualism coupled with limited income and struggle in urban life have an apparent association with the neglect of elderly parents in Bangladesh, a country where social custom is to look after parents at their old age.
Bangladesh is estimated to have more than one million patients with cancer at any point of time and health professionals think an equal number of patients with other mostly incurable diseases like AIDS, progressive neurological diseases, end stage cardiac and respiratory and other non communicable diseases need the palliative care.
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