A foreigners noble gesture to alleviate pain

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: What was once a boat that sailed in the seas of the West, has now become a training centre for doctors and nurses in  palliative care, in the capital city. ‘Cuckoo’, the sailing boat that belonged to UK businessman Bruce Davis and his wife for over 32 years, was sold and the proceeds donated to city-based NGO Pallium India for setting up a training centre.“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,” said the limelight-shy Bruce Davis in an e-mail. This former businessman from Cornwall, in UK, 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.“Our medical education is focused on imparting knowledge and skills, the head and the hands. What is often missing is the heart, or the attitude. We aim to integrate all three at the training centre,” said Dr M R Rajagopal, chairman of Pallium India.Incidentally it was this trust 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. We never had even a proper workspace for them,” said Dr Rajagopal, who has named the centre after the philanthropist as Bruce Davis Training Centre.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, interventions in pain management and so on.And the man who loved sailing, but sold the ‘Cuckoo’ for the cancer patients in the state wrote:”I have been honoured by working with the workers there. I will continue to do what I can as long as I am physically  able.”