Iryna Slugotska is a current participant of the European Palliative Care Academy- Leadership Course. She works as a physician at the Regional Clinical Palliative Care Centre in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. In this Report, Iryna tells us about an exciting palliative care art project which her efforst helped support.
The organisation of a palliative care team at home is a step towards creating an integrated system providing palliative care for adults and children. It is important not only to help palliative patients, but also to provide the same comprehensive assistance to members of their families. Help should be given in a convenient place and at a suitable time. Besides this, patients and family members should be able to contact the medical staff on the phone day and night. The first floor of a residential building provided to the palliative care centre by Ivano-Frankivsk City Hall is just such a place. However, we were then faced with the problem of the general repair of this building. The funds for this were, unfortunately, not provided by the budget.
To overcome this obstacle, our team decided to spread the information about it through Facebook. To our surprise, some people from the acting industry from Ivano-Frankivsk and Kyiv responded – the director of our theatre Rostislav Derzhypilskyy and one of Ukraine’s leading actresses, Irma Vitovska. They created a Performance, “Oscar and the Pink Lady” at the Ivano- Frankivsk theatre. It is the story about a boy with cancer and the Pink Lady, who fulfils his wishes. We shared information about the Performance on Twitter, Facebook and through other forms of media. As a result, this art Project p
rovided a charity show of this performance in different cities of Ukraine. It was organised and shown in Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi and Rivne during 2016. If you would like to see part of the performance, please click here.
The costs raised from these charity shows funded the repairs and construction of a hospice home advisory department. To put the icing on the cake, this art project was honoured with an award for being the best among all charitable projects in Ukraine in 2016.
Author: Iryna Slugotska