Published on: July 31, 2023

Palliative Care is providing quality care of life which is often misunderstood as leisure, luxury, and riches. But Palliative Care is about the basics: freedom from pain, having your queries answered, and even just venting your fears and worries. Fortunately, so much can be achieved, and not necessarily cost a lot of money. Palliative Care turns everything into a better scenario. Thus, Palliative Care is not an ‘optional extra’ and needs ‘priority status’ within public health and disease control programs.

With that in mind, we started working on a way to address this, which blossomed into a session on the Opioid Availability Workshop, held on 14 June 2023 with the Nagaland State Drugs Control Department to discuss the implementation of the NDPS Amendment Rules of 2014. The session was richer & deeper for everyone and we deeply appreciate the Government of Nagaland for making it happen. Felt happy to have participants from private institutions like St. Joseph Pain & Palliative Care Centre, Eden Medical Centre, Christian Institute Health Sciences Research, Holy Redeemer Health Centre, and a few more enthusiastic committed individuals. It was an exciting group from Nagaland.

Though hospitals like Christian Institute Health Sciences and Eden Medical Centre have implemented the rule, there were a few medical institutes that were still facing challenges in getting approval to procure morphine and there was confusion about the registration process of Recognised Medical Institutions (RMI). Therefore, the need was felt to bridge this gap and hence this workshop was conducted to provide the right platform to discuss with the medical institute’s governance along with the State Drugs Control office and help them access essential medicine for medical purposes and use.

The session ended with a beautiful presentation on “Palliative Care in Nagaland” which was shared by the State Drugs Control office and with an assurance of cooperation & support for the private institution who would apply for the Recognised Medical Institution (RMI).

(Report prepared by Rontu Sangma, Regional Facilitator NE – State Facilitation, Pallium India.)