Hospice advisor reaches across globe to Africa

The prospect of making quarterly project management trips to parts of Africa where millions of men, women and children are dying of diseases like HIV/AIDS and cancer would surely depress many people.

But where others might see only darkness and despair, Phil DiSorbo, senior technical advisor for the Foundation for Hospice in Sub-Saharan Africa (FHSSA), sees light and hope.

That's because Mr. DiSorbo, who previously spent a quarter of a century at the helm of Community Hospice in Rensselaer, has witnessed the many ways FHSSA is making a positive impact on the lives of terminally ill people and their caregivers.

"The global AIDS pandemic and other international trage-dies have presented us with opportunities to forge our global connectedness," he noted. "FHSSA has succeeded in making a positive a difference by supporting many of Africa's growing hospice programs, as well as the relatively new African Palliative Care Association."

Meeting a need
After touring African care programs a decade ago and witnessing the enormous needs firsthand, Mr. DiSorbo felt it was a "collective responsibility" to take action. Along with FHSSA's first board chair, Dr. Bernice Catherine Harper, and hospice directors Peter Sarver and Paul Brenner, Mr. DiSorbo co-founded FHSSA.

An affiliate of the U.S.-based National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and the National Hospice Foundation, FHSSA strives to provide comprehensive and compassionate hospice and palliative care in a part of the world where nearly 6,000 people die each day. Mr. DiSorbo has been tireless in forging partnerships to strengthen FHSSA initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa.

"When the very first FHSSA twinning partnership (Com-munity Hospice) was established in 1999, there were only three partnerships: Island Hospice (Harare, Zimbabwe), South Coast Hospice (Port Shepstone, South Africa) and Tapologo Hospice (Rustenburg, South Africa)," he remembered. "By 2006, there were 52. Today, there are 83 partnerships in 16 different African countries and the list continues to grow. These partnerships are vital because they enable us to reach more people more quickly."

Girl power
Mr. DiSor-bo is elated that, on a continent re-nowned for a gender bias against wo-men, a cadre of female volunteers are now receiving ex-cellent training in end-of-life care and the administration of medications.

"There is a large percentage of faith-based support - especially in rural areas," he said. "Part of the richness of Africa is that women reach out and give hours and hours of service to their communities."

Describing the women volunteers as being on "the front lines" of palliative care in Africa, Mr. DiSorbo said their contribution helps to compensate for a severe lack of nurses in both rural and urban areas.

"It's not like in the Albany Diocese, where [Community] Hospice received reimbursement and trained nurses are able to go weekly into patient homes. Unlike in the U.S.A., there is no medical reimbursement for hospice care in sub-Saharan Africa. The only way we can bring care into the homes of the terminally ill in Africa is to train volunteers under clinical supervision." Many terminally ill people in sub-Saharan Africa have little or no access to pain medications like morphine, a staple in American hospice settings. Mr. DiSorbo calls this "an unacceptable situation that FHSSA is working very hard to remedy.

Wanted: medicine
"Our goal is to develop a supply chain of medications that can expediently reach those in need," he noted.

On his next trip to Africa at the end of this month, Mr. DiSorbo is especially looking forward to visiting the Tapologo Hospice at a Catholic hospital in South Africa.

"In October of 2006, the transmission of mom-to-child HIV/AIDS was a big problem, [but] thanks to the use of anti-retroviral [medications] since then, there have been no new cases. That's a 100-percent success rate," he said, beaming.

Such success stories motivate Mr. DiSorbo to continue his role in bringing death with dignity to those who lives might otherwise have ended under the darkest of clouds.

(11/05/09)