Dr. MR Rajagopal is a palliative care physician by profession and the founder of Pallium India, a palliative care NGO based in Kerala. He is more popularly known as the father of palliative care in India and was honoured with Padma Shri award in 2018. He has worked tirelessly since 1993 to integrate palliative care across medical institutions. His advocacy contributed to the amendment of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act of India in 2014 – a critical step allowing millions to access pain relief and reduce needless suffering. He made major contributions in the creation of the National Program for Palliative Care (NPPC) in India. He is a major global force behind efforts to promote and put into practise the right of patients with severe pain to live and die with dignity.
In his talk at TEDxBITSPILANI 2020 event, he talks about how healthcare is everybody’s business and medical staff alone cannot provide healthcare to people and it is not an easy task to bring community and medical staff together because of our present healthcare system. Millions of people in our country are victims of catastrophic health expenditures. Paying for treatments and other related services pushes them into poverty, forces children to drop out, lose their jobs and fall into a vicious circle. He shares two such experiences one with a poor family and one with the rich to highlight the fact that all sections of society are equally hit by this. The poor are often left to die and the rich are tormented in isolation wards in the name of treatment. The overburden of the system cannot be reduced until medical staff and we recognize the significant role of community in healthcare. He stresses on the fact that how compassionate and responsible members of the society can come together and help patients suffering with incurable disease, counsel them and their families and prepare them for life beyond diseases and at a cost which is much less than the hospital bills, after all every human being deserves to die with dignity. This model has been implemented by his team in parts of Kerala and has received an encouraging response. Communities can provide emotional support and practical help to patients and their families which often the medical staff fails to provide. He also states the fact that healthcare for all cannot be achieved without healthcare by all. Community participation plays an indispensable role in connecting lay men to the ever-growing hospitals of the country. He ends his talk with a self-introspection question, what is the meaning of life and encourages everybody to be more sensitized and contribute to healthcare by all. Dr M.R. Rajagopal, aptly called by The New York Times as ‘the father of palliative healthcare in India’, is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and a Padma Shree awardee. Palliative healthcare can be best defined as the act of caring for critically ill patients or caring for patients with complex diseases. Dr. Rajagopal is the director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Policy and Training on access to pain relief and also the founder of Pallium India, an organization that advocates death with dignity as the right of patients. He has also been featured in the 2017, Australian-made documentary 'Hippocratic' telling his remarkable life story. His advocacy has sparked a debate, especially on the front of giving universal access to morphine- a heavily restricted, narcotic pain medicine which has the power to revolutionize palliative medicine This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at [ Ссылка ]
