Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The LivHealth Char­i­ta­ble Foun­da­tion (LCF) launched on Tues­day, hav­ing sur­passed its goal of rais­ing enough funds to pro­vide pal­lia­tive care for 100 pa­tients for one year.

“I can’t ex­press the grat­i­tude for the sup­port for the launch of the LivHealth Char­i­ta­ble Foun­da­tion. These ef­forts will touch so many pa­tients’ lives and tru­ly al­le­vi­ate so much suf­fer­ing. I just want to thank all our spon­sors, all our sup­port­ers, every­body whose at­ten­dance, and every­one who came (and) showed up to do­nate last night. It was tru­ly beau­ti­ful see­ing the sup­port for our fel­low peo­ple, our com­mu­ni­ty,” LivHealth CEO Dr Chelsea Gar­cia told Guardian Me­dia dur­ing the event.

She not­ed that this was on­ly the start of the foun­da­tion’s ef­forts and is look­ing for­ward to fur­ther projects with her team.

Speak­ing at the launch on Tues­day night at the Brix ho­tel in Cas­cade, Dr Gar­cia ex­plained that the foun­da­tion was de­vel­oped as a non-prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tion “to sup­port those in need of pal­lia­tive med­i­cine but can­not fi­nan­cial­ly af­ford.”

“At LivHealth, we be­lieve strong­ly in not just a pas­sion and a love for home-based pal­lia­tive med­i­cine ser­vice but a pas­sion and love for our na­tion and our peo­ple.”

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from the foun­da­tion, the do­na­tions were made to ser­vices such as home doc­tor vis­its, oc­cu­pa­tion­al ther­a­py, bed sore pre­ven­tion and wound care, COVID in the el­der­ly and end-of-life care. Fur­ther than this, it said some of the funds raised will be do­nat­ed to oth­er pal­lia­tive care in­sti­tu­tions in the coun­try.

“And in sup­port of the pal­lia­tive pi­o­neers in our com­mu­ni­ty, such as Vi­tas House, the Liv­ing Wa­ters Hos­pice, the Pal­lia­tive Care So­ci­ety of Trinidad and To­ba­go and the Cau­ra Pal­lia­tive Care Unit, the LCF will be mak­ing a con­tri­bu­tion to these or­gan­i­sa­tions, to aid them in our shared mis­sion of of­fer­ing pal­lia­tive med­i­cine ser­vices to all,” it said.

Ac­cord­ing to the re­lease, there are on­ly three in-pa­tient pal­lia­tive/hos­pice fa­cil­i­ties in T&T, with 36 spots for a pop­u­la­tion of 1.4 mil­lion cit­i­zens.

“While home-based care is avail­able from the gov­ern­ment for the east­ern and To­bag­on­ian re­gions, cur­rent­ly, our lo­cal med­ical sys­tem does not have the re­sources to sup­port our age­ing pop­u­la­tion. LivHealth was formed with the key goal of build­ing an at-home com­mu­ni­ty pal­lia­tive med­i­cine ser­vice that en­sures re­li­able and eq­ui­table ac­cess to high-qual­i­ty, all-in­clu­sive, pal­lia­tive med­i­cine for our na­tion,” it said.