A UK businessman has sold his much-loved sailing boat to support a palliative care centre in Kerala. ‘Cuckoo’, the sailing boat that belonged to the businessman Bruce Davis and his wife for over 32 years, was sold and the proceeds donated to Thiruvananthapuram-based NGO Pallium India, reported leading Indian daily The New Indian Express. 

“Over the years, I have developed an enormous  admiration for the palliative work done in Kerala and the interest and caring attitude shown by literally thousands of volunteers who are associated with this work,”  the daily quoted Mr Bruce as saying. This  businessman from Cornwall, had lost both his father and mother to cancer. Bruce Davis and his family members then set up a charitable trust for work related to pain relief for cancer patients. 

Incidentally it was Pallium India that financed the Institute of Palliative Medicine in Kozhikode, after Bruce Davis came to know of the remarkable work being done there through Dr Robert Twycross from UK, who was in India to attend some workshops. Later Bruce Davis got involved with the hospitals at Vellore and Guwahati too. 

With palliative care attaining the form of a movement in the state, many health professionals, not just from other parts of the country but even from countries across the world, especially South-East Asia, used to visit us to learn and get trained. 

A significant chunk of the training at the centre will be on communication, listening to the patient and the family, understanding their problems and not just the disease, and giving a person-centered care, attending to the psychological, social and spiritual problems of the patients.

Apart from this, the course covers the ethics of care, classification, assessment and management of pain, use of pain-killers, opioid pharmacology, opioid responsiveness, adverse effects and interventions in pain management.