About Build Community Give Care
Who We Are
Build Community Give Care (BCGC) is a non-profit organization created by Emily Beckman DMH, Stacey Miller-Smith MD, MPH, and Victoria Salzman to address global health disparities. Using an effective altruism framework, the BCGC support fund provides cost-effective means to reduce human suffering among people living in Africa.
Our Goal
The BCGC scholarship provides funding and support for education that will reduce suffering and improve the end of life experience by increasing access to palliative care in West Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, where palliative care is desperately needed. The scholarship focuses on enabling nurses and community healthcare workers to complete the established Hospice Africa Uganda Diploma course so they can practice palliative care in their home country.
Our Impact
Due to an overwhelming shortage of doctors, enabling community healthcare workers and nurses to provide the crucial service of palliative care at the end of life is a necessary and powerful way to reach more people suffering in need in rural areas of Africa.
Many African people, including children, are without access to essential medical care at the end of their lives. Our mission is to fix this problem. BCGC provides funding for the education of nurses and other community health workers to learn to provide palliative care through compassionate pain management to people who are suffering and dying.
The HCW Advantage
Globally, only 14% of patients who need palliative care receive it, and 98% of the children in need of palliative care live in low- and middle-income countries, half of them in Africa.
About 80% of those dying from cancer and 50% of those dying from AIDS experience moderate to severe pain lasting an average of 90 days (Foley et al., 2006).
Among the barriers to palliative care in Low and Middle-Income Countries are limited resources, lack of national policies or low priority for pain relief, lack of awareness by health professionals and the public, concern over abuse, legal restriction, medical, religious, and cultural barriers (Foley et al., 2006).
West Africa suffers from a more dire lack of access to palliative care. 86% of the Ghanaian population is without access to palliative and end-of-life care (Compass Ghana – We Enable End of Life Care for All, n.d.).
A powerful and cost-effective way to improve palliative care delivery to thousands in West Africa is to follow Uganda’s example and to train nurses and other clinical health care workers to deliver palliative care and help to relieve pain and suffering during, and at the end of, life.
