CCP has been involved in supporting children’s hospice care for almost 20 years, supporting the Belarusian Children’s Hospice in Minsk and funding a home care team in Gomel and helping to spread palliative care throughout the country.
Anna Gorchakova is a charismatic figure who first introduced palliative care to Belarus in 1995 when she established the hospice in Minsk and we have worked closely with her ever since, organising visits of hospice nurses to the UK and taking palliative care specialists to Belarus. We funded the Medical Director of the Minsk hospice to study post graduate paediatric palliative medicine in Cardiff in Wales, and this enabled her to develop a programme of support which was then rolled out across Belarus.
CCP realised that hospice care needed to be spread throughout Belarus, so in January 2000 we established the first children’s ‘home hospice’ outside Minsk, in Gomel, involving a palliative care team with professional advice and support from the hospice in Minsk. For many years we funded a team who provided medical, social and emotional support to 30 families living in the city whose children had severe genetic disorders, life limiting conditions or terminal illnesses.
Most palliative care for children is now provided by the Ministry of Health but we are working with Anna’s Hospice to provide some extra support when it is needed, particularly for children in Gomel Region.
Read some more about our Home Hospice Team, in a document written in 2018, here and, if you’d like to know how it all started and are interested in reading the complete history of our involvement in and development of this service, then follow this link.
