Background and context: The home healthcare market in Jordan is nascent with little service offered. It suffers from a highly fragmented and underregulated landscape. The limited access to qualified trustworthy home care services, lack of professional home care training, and lack of home health care insurance coverage have added to the heavy in-patient bed demand and delayed hospital discharges especially for disabled or terminally ill patients. Aim: To establish a comprehensive national home care program to improve the delivery of palliative and home care services in Jordan, and to conduct a situational analysis and generate policy recommendations. Strategy/Tactics: We used multiple strategies to reach our objectives. 1. Expansion of home care services at King Hussein Cancer Center (KHCC) to create a local demonstration project. 2. Building health care professional capacity by offering variety of educational programs. 3. Improving quality of service delivery by generating clinical practice guidelines, such as standards operating procedures and patient and family educational materials. 4. Use the pilot operational and financial data to generate an economic model to inform the development of similar home health care units in hospitals across Jordan. 5. National advocacy and building effective partnership with all related stakeholders to advance national policy. Program/Policy process: Between May 2016 and May 2017, 7818 home care visits were conducted by KHCC. For capacity building; 678 health care professionals were trained in palliative and home care, out of which 366 participants were females (54%). Palliative care was successfully recognized as a specialty by the Jordan Nursing Council and recognized as a subspecialty by the Jordan Medical Council. The palliative and home care standards of practice were included in the health care accreditation council. The analysis of economic evaluation data suggested that home care services decreased in-patient utilization and costs which is advantageous to a country with limited resources. As a result of the advocacy stream and a collaborative network, the national palliative and home care strategic framework was generated, and endorsed by the Ministry of Health. Outcomes: The NHCI resulted in a very successful pilot project and achieved specialty and subspecialty recognition. Furthermore, we were able to build the capacity of health care professionals and policy makers in the palliative and home care sector from public, private and academic institutions. In the advocacy and policy dimension, the Minister of Health officially approved and adapted the palliative and home care strategic framework that was developed by this initiative. What was learned: Cross-sector collaboration and effective partnership resulted in system change and policy advancement. Developing effective economic systems is essential in low resourced countries. The initiative was supported by a joint grant from the USAID and KHCC.
Informal caregivers and persons with dementia’s everyday life coping
