KHCC & KHCF Partner with USAID on National Home Care Initiative
With support from the USAID Jordan Competitiveness Program, the King Hussein Cancer Foundation (KHCF) and King Hussein Cancer Center (KHCC) launched a national home care initiative. The effort, which will be led by KHCC, aims to advance the home care services industry in Jordan by scaling up the Center’s own home and palliative care offerings and creating a center of excellence offering education and training to other service providers.
Dr. Asem Mansour, Director General of King Hussein Cancer Center stressed the importance of palliative care and home care for cancer patients, in order to alleviate their suffering and ensure that they get the utmost care, as this specialization has succeeded in developed countries, but is still in its early stages in developing countries. So this project comes to be the nucleus for the establishment of national
programs for palliative care and care for patients in the advanced stages of the disease.
Extending the reach of home care services is a key part of USAID’s commitment to improving healthcare access for all of Jordan’s residents, added USAID Mission Director Dr. Jim Barnhart. “We believe our partnership with the King Hussein Cancer Center and Foundation will help make the business case for a national home healthcare plan in Jordan,” Barnhart said.
Emphasizing that point, Dr. Wissam Rabadi, Chief of Party for the USAID Jordan Competitiveness Program, projected that the KHCC initiative would help create some 1,800 jobs in the coming years. At the same time, home care services will free up bed capacity at hospitals, which can then attract more foreign patients—and investment—as part of the country’s medical tourism sector, he added.
Dr. Omar Shamieh, Chairman of Palliative Care Department at KHCC and the Director of the National Home Care Initiative Project added that this project will deliver innovative and practical solutions to develop capacity and economic model for health care sector as well as for the public and communities where patients live.
High bed utilization rates in Jordan are driven mostly by the needs of the terminally ill and the elderly—patients whose families are not equipped with the tools and know-how to provide care for them at home. This results in soaring healthcare expenditures and puts enormous pressure on the system. The Royal Court alone spends 200 million dinars annually on healthcare reimbursement.