NICOLA Bailhache (45) left the Island seven years ago to travel to South America to help terminally ill patients to have as comfortable a life as possible with the best care and support her organisation can offer.
She returned to the Island last month on home leave and has been giving talks to Islanders on her work and how important it is to let people dying of cancer pass away with dignity.
Before she headed to Ecuador – which had left its mark on her after she travelled there with Jersey Overseas Aid – Dr Bailhache went to London to study for a diploma in palliative care. When she eventually arrived in Ecuador she had to learn the language and initially started work with a Christian charity called HCJB before working with Orphaidz UK, who work with children orphaned by HIV.
But Dr Bailhache’s main aim was always to develop palliative care in Ecuador. With that in mind, she created Fundación Jersey, which is supported by a Jersey trust called Fundación Luz y Vida – the Foundation of Light and Life.
In 2007 the team in Ecuador looked after 80 patients with terminal illnesses including cancer and motor neurone disease, with 80 per cent of those patients dying at home. There are no district nurses in Ecuador, so the team teach families how to give basic nursing care and teach at least one of the family members to inject patients when necessary.
The family also have emergency medicines in the house, as the team are not allowed to do night visits in the dangerous city. ‘I have been impressed by so many family members who have given up jobs and learned new skills to stay at home and give their loved one the best care possible,’ Dr Bailhache said.
Fundación Jersey has eight staff, whose main aims are patient care, adult bereavement, helping bereaved children, education, advocacy, care of volunteers and administration.
The organisation has just benefited from a £30,000 donation from its Jersey counterparts, which will help to pay for a new office and storeroom in the centre of Quito, where their main operation is based.
The office will enable patients to have consultations in a central place and will provide a meeting point for health professionals and a base for bereavement work. They are also hoping to get a parallel service set up in the town of Santo Domingo, three hours’ drive away.
Dr Bailhache, a former Trinity School and Hautlieu School who used to live in St Helier, said that in Ecuador there was very little awareness of palliative care and that if an illness could be cured, patients had no choice but to go home and suffer with little or no support.
St Helier, said that in Ecuador there was very little awareness of palliative care and that if an illness could be cured, patients had no choice but to go home and suffer with little or no support.
The palliative care team that Dr Bailhache has set up for Ecuadorians means they can have pain and other symptoms relieved and discuss what is happening to them. This could involve patient care in their home or in a day hospice, pastoral and spiritual care and bereavement counselling.
She said: ‘It could take from six to 12 months for some patients to get the money for their chemotherapy, and by that time it can be too late. It could then be a case of looking at palliative care. It is all about human dignity and loving your neighbour.’
Speaking about how she got into this side of nursing and what it means to her, Dr Bailhache said: ‘It is wrong that people should be in pain and not have it controlled. It is very rare not to be able to control pain. This is medicine where you are treating the whole family. We are bit like GPs but are showing family members how to help.
Dr Bailhache said that her strong faith – she used to be a member of St Paul’s Church in New Street – had kept her strong in the face of so much tragedy.
‘I have been living in Ecuador for nearly seven years and I still have trouble translating desahuciar, which can mean to be evicted, but for a patient it means to be declared terminally ill or hopeless. That means there is no point going back to hospital because there is nothing more to be done, as hospitals only want to cure. Patients feel abandoned, and I cannot translate the tragic feel that word has.
‘This all seemed like a crazy idea when I went out to do it, but we now have something that is working and is helping families in a very significant way. Sometimes you just know when something feels right, even when there have been some really tough times.’
Dr Bailhache is married to a dentist she met in Ecuador, Reinaldo Guachamin, and they have children, Philip (2) and Phoebe (3). In the future she hopes to hand over the reins to someone else on the team and possibly return to Jersey to bring her children up in the Island.
She said that Islanders had been a great help in the past. She was looking for a £12,000 deposit for the new building in a month and Islanders made sure that it was collected.
Ecuador is poverty-stricken with 17 per cent of the urban population and 55 per cent of the rural population living on less than $2 a day. It can easily cost twice the family’s monthly income to buy essential painkillers. The charity works with two other palliative care charities and the cancer hospital in a bid to create a national association to help with this.
Speaking about the differences in cancer care in Britain and abroad, she said: ‘I really miss the well-stocked pharmacies of Britain and the fact that patients do not have to think about whether they can afford the prescription or not. It really hit home when I became a mum and saw mothers dying so young. Even though a patient has a terminal prognosis, she still matters, she still needs treatment.’nextpage
The members of the team at the clinicnextpage
Child Bereavement Daynextpage
Nicky with her husband and children when Philip was a baby
