With your generous support, we will provide funding for a Ugandan health care worker to complete the Clinical Palliative Care Course (CPCC) offered at Hospice Africa Uganda. The program, which lasts 12 months, costs approximately $4,000 – our goal for this fundraising venture. Program graduates return to their villages to care for very sick and dying patients and their families.

The Hospice Foundation provides financial support for Center for Hospice Care in Northern Indiana and our Ugandan partners, the Palliative Care Association of Uganda (PCAU). Okuyamba means "to help" in Lugandan. It's also the name of an award-winning short documentary produced by the Hospice Foundation to raise awareness of the need for palliative care in Uganda.

The 12-month CPCC course provides health care workers extensive training in palliative care techniques and certifies them to prescribe morphine, the drug of choice for pain control. It also provides graduates with the knowledge necessary to establish palliative care programs in districts with limited access to skilled medical care.

In a country with high incidence of HIV/AIDS, ever-increasing cancer diagnoses and one radiotherapy machine to serve a population of 35 million, the addition of one health care worker licensed to prescribe morphine is immeasurable. One PC worker can support hundreds of patients, and their families, to ensure they receive the physical, emotional, psychosocial and spiritual support necessary to ease their pain and suffering.