ECHO Telementoring to Improve Quality Palliative Care in Underserved Areas

Patients with advanced cancer frequently experience severe multiple physical, emotional symptoms. These are associated with major morbidity in cancer care, poor quality of life, and impact overall survival. Their family members also experience physical and emotional distress. At the same time, patients and their families need to discuss the goals of care and to participate in advance care planning. These issues are even more urgent in medically underserved regions of low middle-income countries. Provision of access to quality palliative care can address these needs effectively. One of the main reasons is the lack of health professional education, training and support to health care providers taking care of this vulnerable patients. There is a great need to train the physicians, nurses, volunteers helping the patients with life limiting illnesses (palliative care clinicians) with skills required to provision of quality palliative care. We are proposing a collaborative ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) telementoring project between the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Aga Khan University(Kenya), Korle-Bu Hospital (Ghana), University College Hospital(Nigeria), Tata Memorial Hospital  (India), and The African Cancer Institute (South Africa). The Palliative ECHO will consist of one-hour, twice monthly teleECHO clinics with participants ECHO. We will also examine the effects of ECHO on patient’ quality of life symptoms and caregiver experience over a period of 1 year.