Nairobi Hospice

Nairobi Hospice was established in 1990 and is East Africa's oldest hospice. It is Kenya's leading provider of palliative care education and service.

The Hospice provides and promotes high quality holistic care for people with life-limiting illness especially cancer, HIV and AIDS. It offers medical and nursing intervention, counselling, psycho-social and spiritual support to help patients and families cope with life-limiting illness. It prepares patients and families for death and also provides bereavement support. The Hospice's services are offered on an outpatient basis, in hospitals and in the patients' own homes within a 20 km radius. It also runs a day-care service.

The Hospice has run a Diploma of Higher Education in Palliative Care with Oxford Brookes University since 2001.  In 2008 it took over the diploma course as a franchise.  The course is run over 18 months and is carried out through distance learning with three residential blocks in Nairobi. Four cohorts of students have graduated over the last seven years. The diploma covers six modules: Death & Dying, Understanding Pain, The Impact of Disease and the Management of Distressing Symptoms, Relationships & the Dying, Bereavement and Professional Issues in Palliative Care.

This comprehensive overview of palliative care, its theory and implementation, aims to provide professionals with the necessary knowledge, skills and confidence to develop, and manage, palliative care services in their regions.

The Hospice also offers shorter courses in palliative care and multi-week clinical placements to health care professionals to enable them to put their theoretical knowledge into practice.

The Trust is supporting scholarships for the diploma course, the costs of clinical placements and is also contributing towards the hospice's core costs.

Further information on Nairobi Hospice can be found here.