Leadership Paper
Asiimwe John Baptist
RM12M12/002
Master of Nursing Science
10th /September /2014
Course faculty: Professor Drake Karen
Providing Pediatric Palliative Care Services for Children with Cancer in a Hospital Setting: A cost Effective Strategy
This leadership paper focuses on how to provide pediatric palliative care services in hospital setting for children with cancer in a cost manner putting into consideration the resource constraints. Firstly, I start by highlighting the current situation through stating the problems or challenges in Uganda today. I then describe my past perspective about this issue and how my perspective has changed of recent. I wind up the paper by suggesting some solutions as a masters’ prepared
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Shortly, after joining third year in the second term, we were taken through a course in palliative care services. And at that moment I came to know that all cancer patients irrespective of their sex, age, or ethnicity could access end of life care service in general. This has been the thinking since then, until today when I can now realize that children with cancer or any other chronic illness are far different from adults and thus require to be managed separately from …show more content…
However, this does not mean that the other non administrative staff can not initiate the idea and lead it except, this just means that there is a need to constantly involve the hospital management in the process for numerous support. Additionally, because of their leadership, they are able to allocate space to house the services, constitute a pediatric palliative care multidisciplinary team, provide it with logistics, and as well train it. Literature about the pediatric palliative hospital care teams in developed countries indicate that a team with a minimum of 10 people is required to start up such a unit and these include a pediatric oncology physician, pediatric oncology nurse practitioner, pediatric nurse in the hematology/oncology practice, dietitians, pharmacist, psychologist, occupational therapist, staff nurse, child life specialist, pediatric unit nurses, and the outpatient social worker (Jennings, 2005). However, you may not need all this team and one health care worker may be trained in more than one field to carter for the shortage of the health care workers in most referral hospitals in Uganda. This may not necessarily require employing workers. Further this multidisciplinary team is meant to provide physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs of children and their families. In