Palliative Care Specialist

What this life looks like

Palliative care is not about giving up. It is about ensuring that every person with a serious or life-limiting illness – cancer, AIDS, heart failure, kidney disease, or any other condition – has access to relief from pain and other distressing symptoms, psychological and spiritual support, and the dignity of dying well rather than in untreated agony. As a Palliative Care Specialist you are the clinician who brings this care to patients who need it. You manage complex pain and symptoms, have honest and compassionate conversations about prognosis and goals of care, support families through anticipatory grief, and advocate for patients whose suffering is often invisible to a health system focused on cure. In Africa palliative care is one of the most critically underdeveloped healthcare services. The continent has approximately 800 palliative care services for 1.4 billion people. An estimated one million Africans die in severe preventable pain each year from cancer and AIDS alone, without access to basic morphine. The palliative care specialist in Africa is not only a clinician – she is a human rights activist.

What she actually does

A Palliative Care Specialist assesses and manages pain and other symptoms including nausea, breathlessness, and depression in patients with serious illness, has goals-of-care conversations with patients and families, coordinates multidisciplinary palliative care teams including nursing, social work, chaplaincy, and psychology, supports family caregivers, provides home-based and community palliative care where inpatient services are not available, advocates for access to morphine and other essential pain medicines, and trains other health workers in palliative care principles.

Where you can work

Why it matters in Africa

Africa has less than 0.5 percent of the world's palliative care services despite having a large proportion of the world's patients who need them. Access to oral morphine for pain relief – considered an essential medicine by WHO – is severely restricted across most of Africa due to regulatory barriers and misguided fears about addiction. Millions of Africans die in preventable pain each year. Developing palliative care services and training palliative care specialists is one of the most direct ways to address this profound injustice.

Your pathway in

A clinical background in medicine, nursing, or another health profession is the foundation. Palliative care training is available through postgraduate certificate and diploma programmes at institutions including Makerere University in Uganda, the University of Cape Town, and through the African Palliative Care Association which has training resources. International fellowship programmes including those offered by Hospice Africa Uganda and MSF also provide pathways. This is a specialty where advocacy skills and clinical skill are equally important.

Skills you will need

Technical: Pain assessment and management including opioid prescribing, symptom management for breathlessness, nausea, and other distressing symptoms, end-of-life care, and advance care planning. Human: The ability to have honest, compassionate conversations about death and dying in cultures where these conversations are often avoided, emotional resilience and self-care to sustain a career working with dying patients, deep empathy, and strong communication with families in distress. Digital tools: Palliative care assessment tools, pain management guidelines, telemedicine for home-based palliative care, and electronic symptom monitoring tools.

A woman in this field

Take your first step

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