Providing Palliative Care in Kenya

Jambo Palliative Care Supporters,

Hope this note finds you well and enjoying the change in season – wherever you may live!

For this report, we’d like to update you on our education effort!

Professor Clarissa Johnston, a palliative care physician from the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, returned this April to share here clinical expertise with the team in Eldoret. She was joined by a palliative care fellow from Indiana University, Dr. Omair Syed. Together with Dr. Hussein Elias, they hosted the Palliative Care Course April 2026 for a variety local healthcare workers. It was extremely well received and improved the local clinical competence in pain management and communication skills.

This May, Dr. Elias and I, along with other faculty from the Department of Family Medicine, taught the Palliative Care Couse at the Moi University School of Medicine. The course is for the 6^th year medical students who are in their last year of training. Their enthusiasm for learning about symptom control and end-of-life care makes is encouraging, and their questions are always insightful. It is a credit to the School to have a specific course in palliative medicine. In many ways they are ahead of US medical schools in promoting patient-focus care.

We are now looking to expand our educational efforts throughout Western Kenya through a Teach the Teacher model. The goal is to provide all healthcare workers within the Kenyan health system with the basic knowledge of palliative care, consistent with their level of training. It is a model promoted by the World Health Organization and referred to as Primary Palliative Care (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/integrating-palliative-care-and-symptom-relief-into-primary-health-care). As noted in our prior updates, your support has led to curricula development, initial testing, and publication in medical journals of our Teach the Teacher models (https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/GO.22.00025, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12904-024-01415-5 , https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/5138).

Your support has been critical in allowing us to obtain this important preliminary data. We are currently seeking funding from sources like the US NIH, but the current climate for international support is challenging. Therefore, your continued support remains critical to continuing our efforts and disseminating palliative care knowledge and care to those in need.

With great appreciation,

Ken