This August, our Sarawak Lien Collaborative Programme reached an important milestone: 43 healthcare professionals completed their final training module and graduated as Cohort 2.
The week opened with participants presenting their own advocacy initiatives — palliative care booths, community workshops, and awareness sessions they had organised in their own workplaces since the last module. It was a strong reminder of how quickly this training translates into action on the ground.
From there, the group moved through advanced content in complex cancer pain management, understanding depression, anxiety and demoralisation in seriously ill patients, and the practical and emotional dimensions of psychosocial care — the financial pressures, caregiving demands, and logistics that shape a patient’s experience of illness as much as their diagnosis does.
Some of the most powerful learning, though, happened not in the training room but at the bedside. During ward visits to Sarawak General Hospital and Palliative Care Ward situated in Lifecare Hospice and Palliative Care Centre, participants sat with patients and their families, practising what they had learned — how to ask about a person’s values, fears, and what matters most to them, not just their symptoms. One moment stayed with the group: a participant hesitated to ask a patient about his family, worried it might cause distress. Our faculty gently pointed out that the discomfort was the participant’s own — and that patients can sense when we hold back, which makes it harder for them to open up. It was a reminder that good palliative care is the courage to sit with hard questions, not the comfort of avoiding them.
The programme also covered communication skills for managing expectations, spiritual care, grief and bereavement, and — fittingly for the professionals doing this demanding work — building resilience against burnout and compassion fatigue. Throughout the week, faculty and participants moved fluidly between Bahasa Malaysia and English, ensuring nothing was lost for anyone in the room.
We were honoured to celebrate this cohort’s achievement at a graduation dinner hosted by YB Datuk Amar Professor Dr. Sim Kui Hian, alongside our 18 APHN and local faculty members who guided participants throughout the journey. Our thanks to Dr Ednin Hamzah, Faculty Lead for the Sarawak Lien Collaborative Programme, for his continued stewardship of this work.
A key marker of this cohort’s success is one built into the programme itself: local faculty members, many of whom came through earlier training, stood alongside our APHN faculty to lead teaching and education sessions throughout the module. This growing local capacity to teach, not just deliver care, is what will allow palliative care knowledge to keep spreading across Sarawak long after each cohort graduates.
Under the leadership of the Sarawak Government, this programme has already helped strengthen palliative care services across four major hospitals and extended training and engagement to 86 health clinics through a structured snowball approach — meaning every graduate carries this knowledge forward to more colleagues and, ultimately, more patients.
Congratulations to Cohort 2! We look forward to seeing the impact you carry into your communities.
Written by Trudy Giam (APHN Executive)
This project is a Lien Collaborative for Palliative Care initiative to build capacity in developing countries in Asia. The Lien Collaborative for Palliative Care was co-developed by the Asia Pacific Hospice Palliative Care Network (APHN) and the Lien Foundation.
