Annual Report 2024-25 presented at the AGM held on 25 October 2025
Annual Accounts 2023-24
Good morning and a very warm welcome to everyone for PCW’s 2025 AGM. Thank you to those joining us online.
I’d like to extend a particularly warm welcome to Dr Grace Rowley, PCW’s new Trustee, who was formerly an Associate. We’re really delighted you are able to join us but I’m really sad to be leaving as you join. Several of us go back a long way to some of PCW’s earliest Toolkit trainings in Lake Region Tanzania. You will be a terrific asset, and I hope very much you enjoy your PCW life! Grace’s profile is on the website.
Annual reports are not only mandatory but are also essential in demonstrating what PCW is about when we are approached by possible partners and potential funders. We know from experience and Ruth will confirm that it’s detail that matters so this is probably longer than you would wish.
This is my third and my last report as I step down from the chair and retire from the Board.
Also retiring from the Board of Trustees is Ruth Wooldridge one of PCW’s founder members. It’s undoubtedly a very sad day but you know you leave with everyone’s fondest love. Saying thank you, even a massive thank you is deeply inadequate Ruth, but we are so grateful to you for everything you’ve done to make PCW the organisation it is and to always lead by example. Your legacy lives on in so, so many ways, both here and overseas. You’re an amazing nurse, a terrific role model, wonderful teacher and a great friend. I love your unstoppable passion for all things palliative care, in particular championing HBC. There’s always something that can be done! Your ability to extract funds for training projects is legendary. If there’s money to be found you will find it.
But most of all there’s the TOOLKIT! Not only is it a fantastic resource but it also underpins your dedication to training. I won’t forget all those really happy times we had teaching together.
And, of course your and Mike’s wonderful hospitality, hosting our Board meetings.
As for my retirement, I would like to put on record what an extraordinary privilege it has been for me to be with you all on this journey, to be part of this amazing group of individuals that is PCW. I have learned so much from you all, met and worked with so many amazing people in, it has to be said, some pretty challenging situations. Yes, it’s
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been hard work, but I’ve had such a lot of fun and ultimately been left with a genuine sense of what a really impressive difference PCW makes wherever it goes. PCW has literally changed my life, entirely for the better and in a wholly life enhancing way. I was never looking for a quiet retirement from life as a GP but when I accepted Karilyn’s invitation to join that Tearfund project in Tanzania all those years ago, little did I know where it would lead!
So I’d like to start the formal part of my report by thanking my fellow Trustees for all they do in driving PCW forward. And to echo my opening remarks of last year’s report, I pay tribute to their/ your hard work, dedication, good humour and unwavering commitment to the cause, despite everyone’s busy lives and, for three Trustees, in particular, pressures from extremely demanding full time professional jobs.
My thanks to Sue Lakie, PCW’s administrator for her invaluable contribution in supporting the Board as she so capably does.
I also want to thank most warmly our financial team, Charles Campion-Smith, the Treasurer, and Isobel O’Connor, our Honorary Accountant, for managing the finances, preparing the statements for Board meetings and for drawing up the annual accounts. Our thanks to Philip Brough for again, examining and signing off the annual accounts. Isobel and Charles have given notice of their intentions to stand down, pending successors being found. I’m going to say more about the finances later on.
Also, PCW’s thanks to Mark Ewins, our webmaster for maintaining the website, and helping us to develop PCW’s shop window, fit for purpose in today’s world. Very much work in progress.
The 2024/5 Board consisted of 8 Trustees and has continued to meet four times a year. I can confirm PCW’s policies are regularly reviewed and updated, appropriate training and refreshing undertaken, overseen by the administrator.
Much of my report just carries on from last year’s.
Succession planning has continued under Fiona Rawlinson, PCW’s next Chair. With two Trustees retiring and one new Trustee being appointed, and indeed a dishearteningly unsuccessful search for new Trustees, particularly those with additional skills beyond health and social care, Trustees are only too aware that PCW faces challenges maintaining its position in the sector. The catch 22 is if PCW doesn’t have the capability to deliver on its mission, then it’s not in a position to bid for work etc, etc…. Strengthening the Board was one of PCW’s priorities last year and I very much regret I wasn’t able to deliver on it. This has to be a priority, and I would urge the Board to renew its thinking around seeking Trustees who have these additional skills especially around grant applications and financial management.
When Gillian found her 2025 Lesotho teaching team depleted, she was fortunate that one of our Associates, Dr Simon Pennell was able to join the Lesotho teaching team, for which sincere and grateful thanks. Several overseas Associates are working in their own
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settings delivering palliative care and it was always part of the plan in the future to draw on their expertise as required particularly in mentorship initiatives following up after training.
And on that point, PCW is therefore delighted to have invited Miss Faraja Henrick Kilewa, working as a midwife at Sokoine Regional Referral Hospital in Tanzania, known to PCW though the Nursing Now Challenge Fellowship, and Dr Mobashshar Hassan, Medical Oncologist at the Senkatana Oncology Unit in Maseru, Lesotho, who participated in the Lesotho trainings to become Associates.
2024/5 has been a busy year for PCW and I would like to congratulate all my fellow Trustees for delivering on the work programme, in particular Gillian Chowns leading on the Lesotho training programme, Charles Campion-Smith leading on the NNF/Global Health Partnership project in Tanzania, and Fiona Rawlinson leading on conference organisation.
PCW hosted its 2024 hybrid conference immediately after the 2024 AGM and was about ‘Reaching those most in need’.
We were delighted that Robert Yates from Chatham House gave the keynote presentation on Championing PC in universal health reforms. As probably the foremost expert in this area, his comprehensive, thoughtful and challenging presentation was warmly received and triggered a lively discussion where frustration was expressed by many of those working in LMIC at the lack of urgency on the part of policy makers in government in the face of sustained and impassioned advocacy on behalf of people, communities and populations desperate for care.
The presentation was recorded and the link is listed with this report and is available through the PCW administrator as indeed are all the conference sessions.
There was then an online presentation and a discussion on the progress of the extremely successful NNF programme in Tanzania from Faraja Kilewa and her colleague, Peter Masinde from Tanzania facilitated by Charles Campion Smith. More on this later
This was followed by Fiona Rawlinson presenting findings from the evaluation project she had been running. More about this later as her findings have just been presented at the APCA conference.
We always include a particularly exciting and important session at the conference where colleagues PCW has worked with in the past can share their work and in 2024 we had impressive online presentations from PCW Associates, Elvis Miti in Tanzania, Marie Rose Ntigura in Zambia, Eseenam Agbeko in Ghana and an extraordinary report from Tamer Aljafara in Bethlehem who leads an HBC team there.
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The conference was brought up to date on the Lesotho trainings, by Gillian Chowns and Tebello Lepheane - ‘Are we nearly there?’ More later in this report.
Again, details of these are available through the list of links with this report.
At our conferences, we always look forward to the international students from St Christopher’s in London attending and in 2024 we welcomed Professor Heather Richardson and visiting colleagues from Brazil, Mexico and Bangladesh on the new multi-professional Beacon Programme that St Christopher’s has introduced to replace their academy programme. This focuses on looking at the impact palliative care is making in the different communities and how it might be strengthened, very much in line with the evaluation and impact of training study Fiona has undertaken.
The link to these presentations is on the list with this report and I thoroughly recommend looking at it.
Our conferences now follow this hybrid model, and this certainly enables more participation and helps to strengthen our connections with the international community. It’s important to stress that they serve not only as a platform from which key issues to do with palliative care in LMIC can be discussed but also serves as a shop window for PCW and its Associates to show what it’s about.
This year’s Conference, which again, immediately follows the AGM will be in a similar format and my heartfelt thanks go to Fiona, and her team, Ruth Alderton, Ruth Wooldridge, Gillian Chowns and Sue Lakie for organising our conferences. As always, we are greatly indebted to Dr Mary Miller and her wonderful team at Sobell. This very much feels like a second home.
I ended last year’s report at the happy point where PCW was about to resume face to face teaching, this time in Lesotho, and I am delighted to report that this is going well under Gillian Chowns’s exemplary and inspiring leadership. Three visits have been undertaken by PCW teaching teams to deliver 5-day basic Toolkit trainings to multiprofessional teams from different institutions in Lesotho in November 2024, February 2025 and September 2025.
To date I am pleased to report that 90 individuals in separate multi-professional teams have completed the basic Toolkit training. I congratulate the team on this achievement.
‘Preparation, preparation’ and ‘Expect the unexpected’’ is the mantra.
Follow up meetings were arranged to review the previous trainings, but attendance was worryingly disappointing-something being discussed and I’m sure will be referred to in Gillian’s forthcoming report on the September course. In that report, next steps around mentorship and the TOT scheduled for 2026 will also be discussed plus some of the challenges that lie ahead, not least of all being how the TOT is to be funded.
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PCW remains reliant on external funding, ever difficult to access, particularly in the face of cuts to aid and development and donor fatigue. PCW is no longer in a position to subsidise these trainings.
A report on the November and February trainings can be found on PCW’s website along with Simon’s reflections on his experiences.
I would like to put on record how appreciative our donor and in country partners on the Lesotho programme are. They like what we do and how we do it and so do the participants. Not only the content and interactive nature of the teaching but also the ability to engage and motivate, many leaving the courses with ‘fire in their belly’ ignited and ‘It’s all in the Toolkit’ ringing in their ears!
Over this last year the PCW teaching teams have included, Gillian Chowns, Ruth Wooldridge, Simon Pennell, Stephen Chowns, Charlie Bond (contributing online) and myself.
Delivering these face-to-face Toolkit training courses which are PCW’s USP is always a challenge, especially so when changes to the teaching team are necessary for one reason or another. It is likely that PCW will increasingly look to local champions for their contribution to support the teams, and for this latest course in September, it was a great privilege to have Joan Marston of the Sunflower Children’s Hospice in Bloemfontein lead the sessions on paediatric palliative care. Joan is a distinguished founder member of the International Children’s Palliative Care Network and of PallCHASE (Palliative Care in Humanitarian Aid Situations) Her contribution was really appreciated, and it is hoped to be repeated.
As I mentioned in my last report, none of this would have been possible without the financial support from Dolen Cymru and the Wales Africa Network, and the wonderful support and wise counsel of Dr Paul Myres of Dolen to whom PCW is extremely grateful. PCW also extends its warmest thanks to Mme Tebello Lepheane, the force of nature behind the Starlight Oasis of Hope Hospice in Maseru, the in-country partner, for not only her invaluable advice, support and making all the local arrangements, but also her contribution to the teaching team. PCW is also indebted to Dr Lucy Maputo of the Lesotho Ministry of Health for her support and for facilitating the important hospital visits.
Moving on to the APCA Conference in September in Botswana I’m delighted to report that PCW was again represented, this time by Gillian Chowns and Fiona Rawlinson.
It is worth noting that PCW has delivered workshops and had poster displays accepted at the last three APCA conferences.
Gillian presented a well-attended workshop on Spirituality, using some material from the Toolkit. This is an important area that often is overlooked in talking about palliative
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care but always sparks lively discussion and often controversy. Feedback was very positive and a short report will be available on the website in due course.
PCW also had two posters (designed by Fiona Rawlinson) accepted, reporting on the important and long thought about survey evaluating training and the impact of training and mentoring previously referred to in my last report.
The survey reassuringly highlighted positive and sustained impact of training and mentoring on both clinical skills and further development of palliative care teams. These findings are reasons to reflect on the successes of PCW’s trainings and should be celebrated. Again, grateful thanks to Fiona for this important study. The posters will also be available on PCW website in due course.
The APCA conference is an important one bringing together as it does delegates from all over the continent to network, sharing experiences and ideas, challenges and successes. These delegates often include Ministry of Health and other government officials from different countries as well as international experts, so it provides a platform for palliative care educators and providers to lobby and advocate for change where progress is slow and policy makers are not yet engaged.
It is a tradition that PCW always sends two delegates and in fact has run workshops at each of the last three APCA conferences. PCW really is seen as a serious player by others in the sector. PCW used to pay for two bursary students to attend and present. Sadly, PCW can no longer fund these.
What was funded though was the Nursing Now Challenge Fellowship Programme which we’ve covered before and which has now come to an end. Another success story for partnership and collaborative working. My thanks to PCW’s Charles Campion-Smith and Megan Jones at Global Health Partnership for running it. Faraja Kilewa is also again reporting at the 2025 conference. There is an executive summary from Charles attached to this report.
We talk about partnerships and collaboration around palliative care organisations and I am proud of PCW’s record on this.
Conversations with colleagues in India have started around supporting refresher courses, supporting the development of in country training programmes and mentoring.
In the last year we have been approached by the Zambia Hospice and Palliative Care Association to provide consultancy support for local training initiatives and I pay tribute to the work of Mrs Marie Rose Ntigura, a PCW Associate, who leads a team in Mazabuka and who is on the ZAHPCA Education Committee. This is consultancy work and PCW would normally charge a fee. The work never even got off the ground because ZAHPCA has no funding.
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This raises an important challenge for my successor and the Board to review PCW’s Finance Policy in relation to its policy on what PCW might or might not charge for and when does an exploratory conversation, be it about training, mentorship or consultancy, transition into work for which payment should be sought
More recently PCW has been approached by Dr Phil Hopkins, chair of the Bethlehem Care and Hospice Trust, a charity that raises money to provide hospice charity care for the elderly and terminally ill in Bethlehem, for advice on supporting further training for the team in Bethlehem. It was Tamer Aljafari’s idea to reach out to us and PCW is enthusiastic to follow this up.
Finally, I want to thank those PCW Trustees who in this last year have been able to promote PCW whilst attending and presenting at various conferences and events at home and abroad, sometimes to do with their professional jobs but sometimes because of related interests. In particular Fiona Rawlinson, through her Cardiff role goes all over the place, and also Ruth Alderton, who was a member of a PRIME team delivering palliative care training to teams of nurses in Pakistan. There is an excellent report of that visit on PCW website.
And finally, finally and you would expect me to sign off with this, back to our beloved Toolkit! In August we had a message from Stephen Connor of WHPCA who had received a request for permission to use the Toolkit by a group of Australian and New Zealand physicians working on palliative care development in the Pacific Islands. They wanted to make some edits to reflect availability of local medicines but said they still find the tool to be an excellent resource. ‘Delighted and of course’ was the response from the authors. Then in September, this from Stephen,
## “Dear PCW colleagues,
I took the liberty of agreeing to this request, as we seem to be having a surge of interest in the PC Toolkit, for another adaptation, in this case, to the Sri Lankan context. Great to see this level of interest. Your work is being appreciated. Kind regards. Stephen”
On that note, I would like to wish Fiona and my fellow Trustees every success in taking PCW forward as it evolves in today’s world. I believe PCW to be in really good shape, in excellent hands but facing many challenges.
Thank you
George Smerdon Chair Palliative Care Works
Palliative Care Works - Home
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## **Links to PCW’s 2024 conference**
Championing palliative care in universal health reforms - Robert Yates
https://youtu.be/gsdx3nIGyoY
The spark that lit the flame - Faraja Kilewa & Peter Masinde https://youtu.be/WUyFrfDq5IQ
End of morning session - PCW Annual Conference 2024 https://youtu.be/bnecIhhw7b8
Updates on current activities - PCW Annual Conference 2024 https://youtu.be/B5hx83SxJ4I Are we nearly there yet? - PCW Annual Conference 2024 https://youtu.be/RxhI00KwYmo
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## The Nursing Now Challenge Fellowship P rogramme
Over the past 3 years PCW has supported teams in the Lindi region of South-east Tanzania in this programme. It is funded by a grant from the Burdett Nursing Trust, administered by Global Health Partnership (formerly THET) with whom we have developed excellent relationship.
It is for early-career nurses with online teaching from UGHE (University of Global Health Equity) and project work using learnt improvement skills and leadership development.
In the first round there were 2 nurses from Ndanda, Sokoine and Nyangao. All were successful in building palliative care understanding amongst colleagues and developing local services. Faraja Kilewa received the Exemplary Leader award.
In the second round two Fellows Faraja and Juma Makotha from round 1 were given additional preparation to act as mentors for four further Fellows – all working at Sokoine. Faraja will make a short presentation about this work at the PCW Annual Conference.
The grant for each round was about £6000. We used most of this to provide protected time for the taught sessions and for planning and delivering the improvement projects focused on sharing understanding of palliative care amongst hospital and community health workers and building local palliative care teams.
Local administration was done through the Tanzania Episcopal Conference (TEC) but the support was delivered directly by PCW mentors through Zoom meetings and WhatsApp conversations. Working in this way we feel we delivered excellent value for money for our partners.
Establishing local champions and securing support form hospital administrators has been important in the sustainability of the work and demonstrating its value. The teams are working for inclusion of palliative care in future hospital budgets. It is great for us to see the continuing work through the WhatsApp group. We will give continuing informal mentorship and offer teaching resources that may be useful.
Dr Charles Campion Smith Trustee Palliative Care Works
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## **PALLIATIVE CARE WORKS (A CHARITABLE INCORPORATED ORGANISATION) RECEIPTS AND PAYMENTS ACCOUNTS FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2024**
## **Opening bank balance as 1 January 2024:**
|PCW
SCCF
**Income:**
THET grant
Conference lunches
St Christopher’s Hospice
Much Loved
Charities Aid Foundation
**Total**|£11,283.85
£392.24
**£11.676.09**
£6,432.90
£260.00
£110.00
£23.62
£230.40
**£7,056.92**|
|---|---|
**Expenditure:**
|**Expenditure:**||
|---|---|
|General|£283.45|
|Secretarial services|£1,003.00|
|Gifts|£605.85|
|BM expenses|£360.00|
|Liberia/Lesotho|£2,022.86|
|Lenovo laptop
|£335.91|
|To TEC for NNC program|£5,500.00|
|Remittee purchases|£685.00|
|**Total**|**£10,796.07**|
|**NET**|**£7,936.94**|
|**Closing bank balance as at 31 December 2024:**||
|PCW|£7,672.53|
|SCCF
|£264.41|
||**£7,936.94**|
I have completed my examination. I confirm that no material matters have come to my attention in connection with the examination which gives me cause to believe that the accounts do not accord with the accounting records. I have no concerns in connection with the examination to which attention should be drawn.
Signed: ………………………………………………………… Date: 15 October 2025
P J Brough ACIB
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