Abstract:

In the past couple of decades in South Africa (SA), higher education (HE) and training has been influenced by the fourth industrialisation and the call for the Africanisation of the curriculum. Within this context that had the practical implications of needing culturally sensitive and multimodal teaching and curriculum design, the accreditation body also required universities to produce critically-thinking, civically engaged students who can work inter-disciplinary. The mode of delivery then further needed to be delivered between two generations that approached the world from vastly different perspectives.

While all these requirements created a tall order for the HE landscape in SA, it also provided the breading ground for innovative programmes aimed at meeting the needs of vulnerable populations. Once such programme is Palliative Care. It is distinctive in its truly multi-disciplinary approach to teaching and practice. With the right to health care being entrenched in our constitution, and with terminally ill children needing specialised care being further underwritten by international treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, it is concerning that as a signatory country, only a very small percentage of children can access the care of a palliative team. While significant funding is being allocated to the curative care of life-limiting illnesses, end-of-life care is glaringly missing in the prioritising and funding of palliative care, especially to children.

Apart from the mentioned lack of policy and funding alignment, there is also a need to ensure a sufficiently trained and skilled workforce is in place to deliver the holistic care to children to address all the treatment domains (clinical and psychosocial). Great strides have been made in the past decade to professionalise child and youth care workers (CYCWs) under the same professional council social workers register at (Council for Social Service Professionals). While some recognition is starting to emerge for the role of social work in adult palliative care on a postgraduate speciality level, the presence of the CYCWs who are uniquely specialised in caring for vulnerable children, is starkly missing. Neither undergraduate programmes touch sufficiently on this area traditionally viewed as belonging to health only.

Against this backdrop, the presentation will provide the following:
• An overview of research results on the inclusion of a paediatric palliative care (PPC) programme in a child and youth care centre
• A motivation for the inclusion of a PPC module into the undergraduate studies of child and youth care and social workers
• A tentative framework for key topics to be covered by such a module, to meet the requirement for practice of these professions to take their place within the PPC team.
• A personal reflection of the presenter’s own experience as a student in a multidisciplinary Postgraduate Diploma in Paediatric Palliative Care

Although the above points will consider the HE context explained earlier, the biggest contribution of the incorporation of a PPC module, will be to provide a solution to a practice challenge, impacting hundreds of terminally ill children daily. Providing practice solutions to societal problems should always be one of the main underlying aims of education, research and innovation.

Keywords:

Multi-disciplinary palliative care, inclusion of paediatric palliative care in social work and child and youth care.