Changing people's lives
2008-10-30
Marguerite Lombard
SERVICE organisations face daunting and often unique challenges, but the reward for those involved is not only to help alleviate suffering, but is also helping to change people’s lives, says Adriaan Venter the new chairman of Drakenstein Palliative Hospice’s board of directors. The hospice ser-ves the communities of Paarl, Wellington, Gouda, Hermon, Saron and surrounding farms. Adriaan Venter is a mechanical engineer by training, and moved to Wellington in 1995 to open a furniture manufacturing plant. He explains that in the Venter family, community service has always been a way of life, possibly because his parents worked as missionaries. “The need out there is enormous, and it has changed dramatically over the past few years. “Traditionally Hospice supported cancer patients, but now with the high incidence of HIV/Aids, many of our patients - children too - have Aids, and as a result the organisation is faced with new and more complex challenges. “Anti-retroviral drugs have improved people’s life expectancy, and now people need to be helped to live with the virus. “The problem is an economic one as well. In the past Aids patients qualified for government grants if their CD4 counts dropped below a certain level. “Now we have the situation where the Aids patient is too healthy to receive the grant, but is too ill to work, or has no work.” The situation has a profound impact on the children within the affected families. Ill parents are often too weak to take care of their children’s most basic physical needs. “Internationally, the whole concept of palliative care has changed. The World Health Organisation for instance includes the family of those suffering from a life threatening illness. “This is also Hospice’s vision: to look holistically at the patient within his or her whole family unit, and to provide a support system that may include socio-psychological help. “For individuals the challenge can be quite overwhelming - the need is so great. The only way forward is to find innovative ways of empowering the whole community.” Adriaan says that many families are single-parent households, so when the mother becomes sick, she is no longer able to cook, care for her children, or see that they get to school. This is where an organisation like Hospice can help by getting a network of people within the community to adopt a family and by providing access to a community based support centre. “Butterfly House in Fairyland is our first community centred facility. The centre provides a daycare facility for young children, and an after-school facility for learners. “It will also be a place where patients can receive medical support and attend literacy and job creation programmes. One of the big challenges for service organisations is to learn to work together. “We as service organisations need to learn to network, to co-operate and facilitate so that we don’t waste our precious resources. “We will be able to reach a lot more people if we plan it properly. The future definitely lies in networking - on every level - to make sure that the “caring” gets to everybody.”
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