IAHPC Senior Advocacy and Partnerships Director Katherine Irene Pettus
IAHPC Webinars, the WHO Executive Board & Human Rights Submissions
First of all, many best wishes for 2025 to readers of this column and palliative care advocates everywhere. Thank you for your interest and attention. IAHPC is looking forward to a very busy year with lots of advocacy activity. Our free and open to the public webinars are one tool in the advocacy kit, along with the opportunity to serve on IAHPC delegations at international and regional meetings of the UN organizations. The IAHPC is gifting all national palliative care national associations a free one-year membership to catalyze their advocacy work with national authorities. Please take advantage of this opportunity so we can work together on the national, regional, and international advocacy fronts!
Tomorrow's webinar: learning by example
IAHPC will host its first open-access webinar of 2025, “Changing the World One Country at a Time,” tomorrow, January 17, at 2 p.m. UTC. [Convert to your time zone.] The event features four of our five Leadership Development Program (LEAD) grantees. Dr. Irene Laska (Albania), Dr. Eric Some (Burkina Faso), Dr. María Córdoba (Colombia), and Dr. Mwate Joseph Chaila (Zambia) will present the programs they worked on from 2022 through 2024 in their countries. All just submitted their final reports and will present the successes and challenges they encountered when integrating palliative care into their own settings. We hope that others in similar settings can learn from their experiences. The fifth grantee, Dr. Piyush Gupta (India), has prepared a video report on his project that will be posted on the advocacy webpage along with the recording of the webinar.
Register for the free webinar. Please share registration information widely.
Jan. 23 webinar: universal health coverage
is incomplete without palliative care
IAHPC's second webinar, which is being hosted by the G2H2 (Global Health Hub) in Geneva, is also open access. It takes place on January 23, on the margins of the 156th session of the World Health Organization's executive board meeting. It is part of a series of policy debates scheduled for the week prior to the meeting. Dr. Sherin Paul is organizing our webinar, which will begin at 3 p.m. CET on January 23. I will introduce the event, titled “UHC is incomplete and inequitable without palliative care.” Dr. Paul will give a presentation on the connection between primary palliative care and universal health coverage (UHC), followed by panelists Irena Laska, Hammoda Abu-Odah, Dan Munday, and Eve Namisango, who will explain what integrating primary palliative care entails in their specific contexts of Albania, Gaza, Nepal, and Uganda, respectively. Register here for the event.
Looking ahead: an interfaith webinar...
In recognition of World Day of the Sick on February 11, the IAHPC will host an international, interfaith webinar with: Rabbi Susan Moss BCC, hospital chaplain at Yale University; Dr. Columba Thomas, a Dominican friar and physician specializing in internal medicine; Dr. Tara Rajendran, a medical doctor, award-winning classical Indian instrumentalist, and palliative care music therapist; and Dr. Sekagya Yahaya Hills, a traditional healer and dental surgeon who collaborates with Hospice Africa Uganda, among other palliative care organizations. Use this Zoom link to attend the webinar.
...& Women's Day webinar
Looking even further ahead, to International Women’s Day on March 8, IAHPC’s internationally diverse female board members will host a webinar to discuss their career trajectories in palliative care, both the blessings and challenges. Look for the registration link in February's Pallinews or social media closer to the date.
IAHPC answers calls for input on human rights
The IAHPC kicked off the new year by submitting two reports to the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in response to global calls for input. You can read the first submission, in which I address the widespread global unavailability of essential palliative care medicines from the perspective of the human rights framework, and the second, authored by IAHPC Board Member Dr. Victoria Hewitt on moral injury of the global health workforce in the absence of adequate palliative care.
Gearing up for WHO board meeting
The IAHPC is gearing up for World Health Organization's first executive board (EB) meeting of the year, taking place in February. The executive board is composed of 34 technically qualified members elected for three-year terms. The annual board meeting, held in January, is when the members agree upon the agenda for the World Health Assembly (WHA) and the resolutions to be considered therein. A second, shorter meeting takes place in May/June, as a follow-up to the World Health Assembly. The board's main functions are to implement the decisions and policies of the WHA, as well as to advise and generally facilitate its work. As a “non-state actor” in official relations with the WHO, the IAHPC is invited to send delegations to these meetings, where we give oral statements, consult with the Secretariat, and network with government representatives and other civil society organizations in attendance.
Since many items pertaining to palliative care are on the agenda this year, we have begun drafting our individual IAHPC statements and reaching out to civil society partners to support our constituency statements. The IAHPC delegation will consist of board member Dr. Hibah Osman, who will attend in person and give our statement on palliative care in emergencies on the floor; Dr. Sherin Paul, a Kerala palliative care physician and consultant who now lives in Geneva; Tebello Theophane, a nurse practitioner and founder of Starlight Oasis of Hope Hospice, who will attend virtually from Lesotho; and IAHPC Board Member Victoria Hewitt, a specialist palliative care physician and educator based in England. Both Lesotho and Lebanon, Hibah’s country of origin, have seats on the EB this year, so Tebello and Hibah will be contacting their national delegations with our advocacy notes prior to the event.
Among many topics, the EB will focus on universal health coverage (UHC) as part of "primary health care (PHC)." Although both UHC and PHC include palliative care in their spectra of essential services, the WHO reports that only 14% of the world’s people who need palliative care receive it. The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) reports that even fewer have access to essential palliative care medicines, such as morphine. Fully integrating palliative care into primary care is essential to meet the needs of a growing—and aging—population. Read our Advocacy Note on Women’s, Children’s, and Adolescents Health in English here. It is also available in Spanish and French on the Advocacy 2025 Initiatives webpage.
If you are interested in applying to join the IAHPC delegation as a self-funded volunteer at the WHA in May, please contact me. It’s a great opportunity to learn advocacy on the job! Limited slots will be available, as the Palais de Nations is still under construction.
INCB training session in East Africa
The INCB is hosting a Global Learning Programme training session for regulators of governments in the East Africa region in Nairobi at the end of January. The IAHPC, which recently signed a historic MoU with the INCB, has been invited to give opening remarks for civil society. Dr. Zipporah Ali, former executive director of the Kenya Hospices and Palliative Care Association, has graciously agreed to represent the IAHPC at this meeting. If you are interested in knowing if your regulator is attending the Nairobi meeting, or would like to request INCB training for your region, please contact me. Look for Dr. Ali's full report in a February edition of Pallinews.
Thank you again for being a reader and supporting IAHPC's advocacy program. We look forward to a fruitful 2025.
Editor's note: Your donation can be directed to IAHPC's advocacy (or education, research, communication, or general funds).
Farewell & Happy Retirement, Gilles!
As regular readers of this column know well, the IAHPC is a non-state actor in “official relations” with the World Health Organization. This is a formal status that entails both privileges and obligations, such as regular reporting, and coordination with a designated focal point at a specific department or division at the WHO.
Dr. Gilles Forte, in WHO's Department of Essential Medicines, was our focal point when I first joined IAHPC as a part-time advocacy officer in 2014. I met with him often when I was in Geneva, as well as in Vienna when he attended meetings of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) to report on scheduling, or other WHO treaty obligations under the international drug control conventions. We were friends as well as colleagues, and IAHPC wishes him the best in his well-deserved retirement.
Dr. Gilles Forte in a photo I took at an IAHPC side event at the CND in 2019 on the widespread global unavailability of internationally controlled essential medicines. Pictured (R-L): Dr. Forte, IAHPC Chair Dr. Lukas Radbruch, former INCB President Viroj Sumyai, Australian Ambassador Brendan Hammer, Ecuador Minister of Health Dr. Verónica Espinosa Serrano, Sylvia Trent Adams (Assistant Secretary for Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), and IAHPC Research Advisor Tania Pastrana. Photo by Katherine Pettus used with permission.