Development of palliative care in Malta

The recent change in name from Hospice Movement Malta to Hospice Malta, is timely and appropriate.

When Hospice was founded in Malta in 1988 the existence of palliative care as a medical specialty in its own right with a particular multidisciplinary approach was hardly known in these islands.

The modern Hospice idea was the brainchild of Dame Cicely Saunders who on appreciating the burden of suffering experienced by patients in an advanced state of cancer developed a mode of treatment which was not widely accepted by the medical orthodoxy of the time.

Dame Saunders was then a nurse and it was a consultant surgeon working on her ward who advised her to become a doctor if she hoped to convince the medical fraternity of the validity of her philosophy.

She subsequently qualified as a doctor and after serving a period at St Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney, London, run by Irish Catholic nuns, founded her own hospice in Sydenham, Kent.

It was at the seminar on palliative care held in 1988 at the Holiday Inn that the modern hospice idea was launched in Malta. Six leading British exponents of hospice were invited to participate and the name Hospice Movement Malta was taken on to make a mission statement, namely one which coincided with the hospice idea conceived by Cicely Saunders.

After more that two decades the specialty of palliative care is firmly established in our islands and the privileged and competent practice in this field of care by a voluntary organisation is unquestioned.