Caring and Conflict-Palliative Care in the Armed Forces: The Challenges for Caregivers.

Objectives: In India, Palliative care remains inaccessible, especially in remote areas. This study aimed at exploring the experience of caregivers related to arranging palliative care at home, for personnel and family members of an armed force.

Materials And Methods: Qualitative study based on thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with adult caregivers - either serving personnel or their dependent family members.

Do 'virtual postcards' enhance blended learning?

Background: In the traditional 'postcard' educational technique, learners write learning points on a postcard at the end of a face-to-face teaching session. The teacher subsequently posts them back to the learners in order to remind and reinforce learning. Cardiff University's Palliative Care Masters programme adapted the traditional postcard technique to suit a modern blended learning course, introducing the concept of 'virtual postcards'.

A Reflection on the Experience with Conducting a Clinical Audit Aimed at Optimizing Pain Assessment in Cancer Patients in Sri Lanka.

Context: One of the principle obstacles identified in suboptimal management of pain in worldwide cancer patients is inadequate assessment of pain which in turn leads to poor management. In Sri Lanka, this is heralded by the lack of medical or nursing professionals qualified in Palliative Medicine/Care to date in Sri Lanka.

Aim: The aims of this clinical audit were to raise awareness and optimize the assessment of pain among resident patients of a tertiary care cancer hospital by oncology doctors.

The African Organisation for Research and Training in Cancer and its conferences: a historical perspective and highlights of the Ninth International Conference, Durban, South Africa, 21-24 November 2013.

The objectives of the African Organisation for Research and Training in Cancer (AORTIC), both at its inception in the early 1980s, and at its reactivation in 2000 following a decade of inactivity, included bringing the products of decades of advances in cancer research to African populations through international collaboration. The historical perspective provided in this report illustrates progress in achieving these objectives through successive continent-wide activities over a period of 30 years, culminating in the organisation's most recent conference held in Durban, South Africa, 21-24 November 2013. The constant growth in the number of attendants and increasing diversity of the nations of their origin are consistent with advances, whereby the number of participants and the nations of their origin have grown from 24 in 1983 to almost 1000 in 2013, and from 14 to 70, respectively.

Palliative medicine teaching program at the University of Cape Town: integrating palliative care principles into practice.

The article describes the development of the postgraduate palliative medicine programs at the University of Cape Town (UCT) through collaboration with the Palliative Medicine Division from the University of Wales College of Medicine in Cardiff, United Kingdom. The course is presented as a distance-learning program supported by web-based learning with three face-to-face teaching sessions during the course. UCT recognized the urgent need to assist African doctors in developing the medical skills required to care for an ever-increasing population of patients and their families who are faced with terminal illness and the physical, emotional, psychosocial, and spiritual distress associated with end-of-life issues.