Promoting Paediatric Pain Management

Thank you all for your ongoing support to promote paediatric pain management. We were really excited to run a one day workshop on children’s palliative care, which included pain management at the SIOP African conference in Kampala, Uganda on the 16th March 2022. The workshop was held to introduce participants to the principles and practices of children’s palliative care and its integration into the management of children with cancer. A range of topics were discussed and the sessions were facilitated by experienced facilitators from the International Children’s Palliative Care Network (ICPCN),  the Palliative care Education and Research Consortium (PcERC) and World Child Cancer (WCC). Over 80 nurses from a range of countries including Uganda, Ghana, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Cameroon, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and South Sudan attended the session held at the Serena Hotel, Kampala. Uganda. The presentations from the workshop can be accessed here. The workshop was made possible by the Burdett Trust for Nurses through a grant to the Global Health Academy at the University of Edinburgh.

We are also attending the EPEC Paediatric Become and EPEC-Pediatrics Trainer Conference and EPEC-Paediatrics Professional Development Workshop in San Francisco next week, so that we will be able to support the running of the EPEC courses alongside St Jude’s and others form the EPEC team. The first of these workshops will be in August prior to the APCA palliative care conference. 

We have continued to be involved in a range of webinars, providing education and information on children’s palliative care and in particular pain management for individuals from around the world. We are also working with several organisations across the UK and Europe looking at the use of a children’s palliative outcome scale with the assessment of pain being a core component of this. We have also been working with colleagues in South Africa to develop a project on paediatric pain management and are currently awaiting news on our funding applications. So there is a lot happening.

There are many new and exciting opportunities ahead of us and we look forward to collaborating with many of you as we seek to improve access to children’s palliative care and pain management around the world.