Richard is currently a co-director of MWAPO Health Development Group (HDG), a Kenya-based organization with the vision of increasing access to quality health and social care services for those in need in lower and middle income countries (LMICs). MWAPO-HDG works across four strategic outcomes including, partnership development, evidence generation, strategic advocacy and capacity development. He was previously Director of Research at Healthcare Chaplaincy (HCC), a New York City-based leader in the research, education and practice of palliative care and the Director of Learning and Research at the African Palliative Care Association, based in Kampala, Uganda. A referee for multiple academic journals, Richard was the founder of the African Palliative Care Research Network, a member of the research committee of the International Children’s Palliative Care Network, a member of the steering committee of the International Palliative Care Family Carer Research Collaboration, and a co-chair of the European Association of Palliative Care’s Task Force on Palliative Care in Africa. From a social scientific background, Richard’s palliative care research interests included: outcomes research; the development and validation of adult and pediatric outcome tools; family carers (especially the elderly and young); access to, and availability of, pain management medication; the elderly; the task-shifting agenda; and policy makers’ information needs. With experience of working in multiple African countries, he has been resident in the continent for 12 years. He has a BA (Hons) in Sociology, a MA in Applied Population Research and an MSc in Health Care, the latter two from the University of Exeter, England.
In the words of Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth century African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
It’s a saying that accurately captures the study team’s experiences of implementing the GIPPEC-MWAPO Health Development Group’s collaborative...
Read more »Reflecting on challenges to data collection by Nancy Gikaara
It has been both exciting, and a little challenging, working on this unique study in Nairobi Hospice, producing a number of learnt lessons that will serve as a launching pad as the study team moves to the subsequent sites.
To begin with,...
Read more »After months of planning across two continents by the collaborative research teams in Canada and in Africa, mid-October 2016 was a flurry of activity as Richard Powell (local Principal Investigator) and Nancy Gikaara (Research Assistant) traversed Kenya to launch the quality of death and dying (QODD) study in three local...
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