In the absence of formal palliative care policies, palliative care education has been undertaken by individuals.

Palliative Care Initiative, Nigeria

Olaitan Soyannwo uses her position as lecturer and senior academic to spread knowledge of palliative care.

Right now at Ibadan we have a new group in the College of Medicine and we’ve introduced palliative care into the curriculum of medical students and nursing students. The proposal has been sent from the Faculty, it’s now awaiting, you know, confirmation at the College level so that once that is passed it can go into the curriculum.¹⁷

From April 2005 an oncology nurse from PCIN will undertake an 8 week course at Hospice Africa Uganda.

Hospice Nigeria

This home based care programme has identified the model of training used by Hospice Africa Uganda as appropriate for its training development.

I now know that the Uganda model is much, much more to relevance to us in Africa, I mean in terms of setting up something because one can then, you know, the facilities are much limited here, and I’m thinking that it would be easier to incorporate, what palliative care training and teaching into existing healthcare model that is within the country, so that if everybody, even right up to the village health workers, are trained, because like now in terms of malaria for example they are training people to give home care, so if people are trained at every level to, on palliative care, so that even if the patients are discharged to distant places you can have some contact point and so that you, after training a few experts in palliative care, I mean in terms of doctors, nurses, social workers, they can now train the others locally. So that you send a few out for training, maybe to other centres in Africa, and then those can go back home and train more, that’s the way.¹⁸