My friend Anne Merriman, who has died aged 90, was a pioneering doctor and founder of the Hospice Africa charity, which aims to offer “palliative care for all those in need” across the continent.
While working in Singapore in the 1980s, Anne devised an affordable morphine-based painkiller, and took it to Africa in the 90s. In 1993 in Kampala, Uganda, she founded Hospice Africa, establishing a hospice model that could be adapted for other countries. By 2023, Hospice Africa had cared for more than 37,000 patients in Uganda, and today it helps provide home-based palliative care in more than 35 countries across Africa.
