Promoting the Rights of Palliative Care Patients in Ukraine
In September 2009 the International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) conducted an open competition ‘Documentation of human rights violations in palliative care’. Three NGOs from Rivne, Kyiv and Kharkiv were selected to document patients’ cases related to denial of pain management medications (particularly opioids), provide legal aid to patients with a limited life prognosis and their family members, and design a database with most typical human rights violations in palliative care.
Technical assistance under the projects was provided by Human Rights Watch (HRW), an international human rights organization, and the Open Society Institute in New York.
On December 12-13, 2009 Diederik Lohman of Human Rights Watch, in collaboration with the All-Ukrainian Network of People Living with HIV and IRF, conducted a training for the project coordinators, lawyers and social workers who would document human rights violations. The training participants learned about international recommendations on palliative care, a connection between palliative care and human rights, the national narcotics regulations as well as barriers to change in policy making, education and drug laws.
In April 2010 Diederik Lohman and the IRF grantees documented palliative care patients’ stories and collected testimonies from doctors, nurses and patients in Rivne, Kharkiv and Kyiv. The HRW representative also interviewed government officials from the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, State Pharmacy Center and Institute of Palliative and Hospice Care.
As a result of this joint documentation effort, HRW will develop a report on regulations, pain treatment practices and denial of pain relief in Ukraine. A separate national report will be prepared by the IRF grantees for public distribution and advocacy efforts.
Such efforts will aim to increase state funding for palliative and hospice care, introduce the national pain management protocol, improve awareness among healthcare workers and lobby state officials for better access to narcotic analgesics (in particular oral morphine) for palliative care patients. Two videos on access to pain relief medications for HIV-positive people will be presented at XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna on 18-23 July 2010.
International advocacy will be conducted by HRW and the Open Society Institute with involvement of the UN Special Rapporteurs on Torture and on Health, the International Narcotics Control Board and the Council of Europe.
